Search

For children and their families who have experienced success in middle years mental health interventions, adolescence represents a developmental period when additional challenges can emerge and potentially threaten positive gains. For youth who have a history of disruptive behaviors, addressing risks and balancing interventions with a focus on skill development, leadership, and resiliency can serve to support these youth in reaching their potential. This paper will present the development of the Canadian SNAP-Boys Youth Leadership Services, a continuing-care component for youth who have had previous involvement in children's mental health services, designed to enhance protective factors or developmental assets. This exploratory qualitative study was conducted in 2017 and examined 12 youths' perspectives on what they have gained from participation in the program, and why they consider this program to be of value. We used thematic analysis to analyse interview transcripts. We identified themes of motivation, "second home", and personal growth. What youth value and their investment in the program can be linked to key positive youth development components of a skills focus, explicit leadership and employment opportunities, program structure, supportive relationships and a sense that they matter. Implications for practice, research, and policy are shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early Intensive Behavioural Intervention (EIBI) is effective for preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Parental measures are rarely included in EIBI effectiveness studies, yet parental distress and lower self-efficacy are associated with poorer child outcomes. Parents of preschoolers with ASD (N = 485) were surveyed at baseline (T1), one-year post-intervention (T2), and school entry (T3) about family distress/crisis, parental self-efficacy, and satisfaction with services in two Canadian provinces. Family distress/crisis decreased and parental self-efficacy increased from T1 to T2. Increases in self-efficacy were largely maintained at T3. Parents were highly satisfied with services. Greater satisfaction for those residing in the province utilizing a parent-coaching model suggests that parent involvement is associated with positive parent outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction: Faculties of Pharmacy worldwide have to adapt their curriculum to accreditation criteria. The present study explored how the Association of Faculties of Pharmacy of Canada’s (AFPC’s) 2010 Educational Outcomes are perceived and taught at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy (LDFP). These outcomes were adapted from the CanMeds Physician Competency Framework which describes both medical expert and non-expert roles.Methods: We wondered if pharmacy would struggle, as medicine has, to integrate these roles into curricula in meaningful ways, given the absence of previous studies from Pharmacy. We conducted an exploratory interview study with 10 core faculty members in charge of courses where non-expert roles were taught. Data were analysed using conventional content analysis.Results: Faculty members understood that the AFPC Outcomes are important for students, patients, and the profession of pharmacy, and some saw the roles as knowledge-based and teachable using content from academic disciplines. However, most saw them as skills taught informally or through clinical experience. They used the roles as a framing device to legitimize their course content and relied on informal role modelling to do most of the teaching. The few faculty members who taught content related to these roles had postgraduate education in a social science or humanities discipline.Discussion: Similar to studies of Faculties of Medicine, our study highlights the difficulty of translating a role-based, competency framework into concrete, integrated curricula for students. Competency development should be explicitly embedded into the curriculum and cannot be left to individual instructors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interprofessional education (IPE) has been widely incorporated into health professional curricula and accreditation standards despite an arguably thin base of evidence regarding its clinical effects, theoretical underpinnings, and social implications. To better understand how and why IPE first took root, but failed to grow, this study examines one of the earliest documented IPE initiatives, which took place at the University of British Columbia between 1960 and 1975. We examined a subset of 110 texts (academic literature, grey literature, and unpublished records) from a larger study that uses Critical Discourse Analysis to trace the emergence of IPE in Canada. We asked how IPE was promoted and received, by whom, for what purposes, and to what effects. Our analysis demonstrates that IPE was promoted as a response to local challenges for the Faculty of Medicine as well as national challenges for Canada's emerging public healthcare system. These dual exigencies enabled the IPE initiative, but they shaped it in somewhat divergent ways: the former gave rise to its core component (a health sciences centre) and the latter its ultimate purpose (increasing the role of non-medical professions in primary care). Reception of the initiative was complicated by a further tension: nurses and allied health professionals were sometimes represented as independent experts with unique knowledge and skills, and sometimes as assistants or substitutes for medical doctors. We relate the successes and frustrations of this early initiative to particular (mis)alignments of purpose and relationships of power, some of which continue to enable and constrain IPE today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers the author's insights on competency-based medical education (CBME) implementation in Canada and its significance. Topics discussed by the author include the concerns about CBME quality, the issue concerning the additional work and resources required by CBME, and CBME as a faith-based medical education (FBME).

Traditional models of educational outcomes relate academic achievement to university experiences controlling for background characteristics, like former levels of achievement. In these models, most of the variance in the outcome under consideration is explained not by experiences inside the university but by background characteristics, such as prior levels of academic achievement. In many instances the contribution of institutional experiences to outcomes under consideration is small. To date, researchers have not included sense of coherence (SOC) among background characteristics. In the current study traditional models are modified to include SOC as a possible contributor to first year academic achievement among domestic and international students with English and other first languages at four Canadian universities. It is found that a model including SOC better fits data for commuter and residence students than a model in which SOC is omitted. Although the effect of SOC on first year academic achievement is small, it is larger than the effects of some institutional experiences. As a result, SOC should be included in attempts to explain first year academic achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]