Send us a text October’s SPARK: Conversations monthly podcast is on child health in the community with our new podcast host, Dr. Katharine Smart in conversation with special guest, Alison Quigley. Alison is the Senior Vice-President, Patient Care Services & Master Plan Clinical Lead at Trillium Health Partners. Alison will be discussing her experiences at Trillium Health Partners, systems consideration for community-based hospital services, leveraging virtual care supports, and how her fr...
Send us a text In this episode of the SPARK: Conversations podcast, host Dr. Katharine Smart engages with Dr. Leigh Chapman and Rebecca Earle in a compelling discussion on nursing retention and the role of the nursing workforce in right-sizing healthcare systems for children. They explore challenges faced by new nurses in children’s healthcare, including post-pandemic burnout, and emphasizes the importance of retention strategies, as described in the newly released Nursing Retention Toolkit. ...
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Send us a text The UNICEF 2020 Report Card revealed that while Canada ranks among the countries with the strongest economic, environmental, and social conditions for growing up, it ranks 30th of 38 countries in measures of children’s mental and physical health, education, and social wellbeing. As well, existing inequities have worsened as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The time to make children a priority is NOW! Working in collaboration and partnership with passionate stakeholders,...
Send us a text Children’s Healthcare Canada and our members have called for a national, evidence-informed formulary of medications for children and funding for related pediatric drug research and development. In the most recent Speech from the Throne, the federal government reiterated its commitment to a national, universal pharmacare program to ensure that all Canadians can access the medications they need. Children and youth have unique drug needs, which have long been neglected. Appr...
Send us a text If you ever needed healthcare (or if you work in healthcare) for kids you probably know how fragmented the system is, how long some waitlists are, and how the quality of care often depends on where you live and even who you are. In this episode we discuss how creating a Learning System in Child Health can help begin to address some of these issues at a regional, provincial, and national level.
Send us a text During this episode we learn of a decades-long journey to bring a children’s hospital to a province that had none - but the story is about so much more than building a hospital. It is about Canadian health system improvement for children and families. It involves: Developing and maintaining partnerships with like-minded organizations locally and across the countryEngagement with government and health system leadersOpen, transparent, tailored communicationsListening deeply to an...
Send us a text When children, youth, and their families visit a children's hospital of the future, what will have changed in their experiences of care, their health outcomes, and community health? What will it be like to work there? How will the hospital serve its community? How will it adapt to changing demographics, emerging technology, a focus on care delivered closer to (or even in) home, public demands, or new pandemics? How will the training of health professionals have changed? ...
Send us a text COVID vaccines have been approved in Canada for youth and adults 12 and older. The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI, 2021) recommends that (with very few exceptions) that a complete series with a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine should be offered to individuals 12 to 18 years of age. While Pfizer recently announced a COVID vaccine trial involving children aged 6 months to 11 years, most children younger than 12 are not likely to be vaccinated in Canada until la...
Send us a text Due to its federated nature, Canada does not have a national structure for the governance of child health or health care. Joined up governance (or a ‘whole of government’ approach) has been touted as an important tool in tackling “wicked” problems in children’s health and healthcare, which involves multiple ministries responsible for health, social services, and the social determinants of health. Integrating child health systems and services is such a wicked problem becau...
Send us a text Health inequities are “unfair, avoidable, and remediable differences in health status between countries and between different groups of people within the same country” (WHO, 2013, p 3). COVID has revealed inequities that many in healthcare, some more than others, already knew existed. We’ve noted differences in who is exposed to and infected by COVID, who ends up in hospital or ICU, and who is able to or choses to follow public health guidance (masks, social distancing, v...
Send us a text This podcast focuses on patient partnership for child health research, practice, and systems. Listen in as Dr. Katie Birnie shares her perspective on patient partnership and Partnering for Pain, an award-winning research program which she leads and which integrates patient and family partnership and multi-stakeholder engagement to improve the prevention, assessment, and management of pain experienced by children and their families. At the time of the rollout of a COVID va...
Send us a text While COVID-19 has resulted in a global health crisis with considerable negative health impacts affecting children and youth, climate change has been an evolving and escalating global threat to child health for even longer. The global mean temperature warming is escalating and will have lasting momentum for centuries to millennia. However, immediate action can mitigate future warming in the next two decades and will immediately improve air quality. Unfortunately, the impact of ...
Send us a text Misinformation and even disinformation are not new concepts in science. This has been evident during the COVID-19 pandemic while the world has monitored, shared, and re-shared information on the spread of the virus, public health restrictions, and immunization. Recently, the COVID-19 discussion has become even more emotionally charged with a vaccine available for some children in Canada. Unfortunately, we can see that the skills required for critical consumption of evidence app...
Send us a text Children and their family members have unmatched, dyadic impacts on each other’s health. This is especially prominent in children and families that, due to unfortunate circumstances, are frequently connected with hospitals, researchers, and health systems. As such, it is imperative that we engage families in healthcare processes, and recognize their stories, experiences, and input as the valuable forms of knowledge that they are. We recently had the opportunity to sit down and ...
Send us a text Guest: Susa Benseler, MD, PhD; Director, Alberta Children’s Hospital Research Institute at the Cumming School of Medicine; Strategy Lead, Child Health and Wellness Research Strategy; Husky Energy Chair in Child and Maternal Health; Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation Chair in Paediatric Research; University of Calgary Children’s Healthcare Canada’s strategic priorities include informing the development of innovative and integrated health systems and advocating to improve ch...
Send us a text The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has taught us many lessons, including best practices for immunizing populations efficiently. To retain what we have learned, and continue to improve vaccine confidence and uptake, the Canadian population will rely on experts like Dr. Manish Sadarangani to lead robust infectious disease and prevention research. On this episode of SPARK: Conversations, we sat down with Dr. Sadarangani to discuss natural and vaccine immunity to COVID-19, approaches to...
Send us a text Infancy is a developmental period when children are most vulnerable and when they present with the greatest potential. Infant and early mental health (IEMH) involves the social, emotional, cognitive wellbeing of infants and young children. IEMH care aims to ensure every child has the best possible start in life. Research tells us that: Infant and early child development sets the stage for later development and functioning.Babies and young children who experience adversity are a...
Send us a text Description: COVID served as a catalyst for the spread and uptake of mis- and disinformation, threatening the trust Canadian citizens have in vaccines and, frankly, putting lives at risk. Further, the extra disease burden on the healthcare system exacerbated pre-existing problems, including in the area of health human resources (e.g., staff burnout and shortages). Some may ask, So what? Why are these problems so concerning? How do we go about rebuilding trust in healthcar...
Send us a text Description: The Canadian healthcare system is currently unable to meet the demands of the people who need it. Children and adults alike are seeing extended wait times for emergency rooms, ambulances and surgeries as well as closures of essential rural emergency centers due to staffing shortages. Dr. Katharine Smart, the current president of the Canadian Medical Association, has previously warned that Canadian healthcare is on the brink of collapse. She joins us as she ne...