Dear CanChild,


Welcome to the December 8th edition of CanChild Today! We are excited to share updates about new grants received, the CP-NET photo contest, the EKO Spring Symposium, research opportunities, a CanChild shop feature, and summaries of recent publications.


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New Grants!

A $6.9 million grant will allow Enabling Visions and Growing Expectations (ENVISAGE) to embed the evidence-based program across Australia to empower, support and connect caregivers raising children with developmental concerns or disabilities.


While this is an Australian grant for delivery in Australia, CanChild is a key partner and will continue to be involved in supporting the implementation and evaluation of ENVISAGE.


ENVISAGE was first co-designed by parents, service providers and researchers in Australia and Canada, and includes a dedicated co-designed First Peoples program.

Learn more

CanChild is partnering on a project with CBC Kids to optimize closed captioning for children with disabilities! The results will inform the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)’s accessibility strategy and help determine what solutions and opportunities are available and create a more inclusive audience experience. All results will be shared with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) and other organizations that provide content for children with disabilities, via a report of the research findings, a policy brief, and a web project page of all materials to be shared with others.

Learn more

CP-NET Photo Contest Winners!

We are excited to announce the winners of the photo contest! 


Jeanine McDonald - 'Beach Combing'

Sara Caixeta Scalco - 'Bia and Her New Friend'

Naiara Mourão Ohnesorge Alonso - 'I Love to Walk with My Cousin' 


Congratulations Jeanine, Sara, and Naiara and thank you to everyone who submitted photos for the contest!

Mark your calendar for the 2023 EKO Spring Symposium!

Call for Presentations and Posters is open until January 13

 

Empowered Kids Ontario’s (EKO) annual conference, the Spring Symposium, returns April 12 & 13, 2023 at the Sheraton Centre Toronto. The program includes a variety of presentation formats such as plenary talks, panel discussions, and Family First conversations, and more, as well as poster presentations. EKO’s Spring Symposium is known as a leading event for Ontario’s child development and pediatric rehabilitation sector—a platform for clinicians, students and trainees, parents, youth and stakeholders to share knowledge, learn together, network and collaborate so kids with disabilities and their families live their best lives. Registration opens early in 2023.

 

Share your research, innovations, best practices, living experience, and great ideas at the EKO Spring Symposium 2023 as a presentation or a poster. Spark the imagination, introduce new perspectives, encourage dialogue, drive solutions to challenges in service delivery and in operations and push boundaries for research questions. The Call for Presentations and Call for Posters are open now until January 13, 2023.

Participate in Research!

Do you have a child (<18 years old) living with cerebral palsy? Or are you younger than 18 and living with cerebral palsy?

Living with Cerebral Palsy: Pain Survey for Families


Families of children and adolescents living with cerebral palsy are invited to participate in an online study to better understand the CP pain experience. Parents, children/adolescents living with CP, and sibling(s) are all encouraged to partake! Interested family members can complete their consent form online and will receive a survey access code shortly after their consent form is submitted. For more information, please email cppain@iwk.nshealth.ca.

Complete the consent form here

Ongoing Research!

Do you want to participate in more CanChild affiliated research? Current projects include:

CanChild Shop Feature!

About My Child - French (Canadian) Version is available!


About My Child is a caregiver report tool. It can be used to collect narrative descriptions of a child and family's strengths and to document concerns related to 20 areas of child development. For each area of concern, caregivers are asked to rate the impact the concern has on a child’s ability to participate in everyday activities. These responses can be scored to provide a measure of 'health complexity' ranging from 0 to 80.

Learn more

Recent Publications by CanChild Members!

Exploring the “how” in research partnerships with young partners by experience: Lessons learned in six projects from Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.


In this paper, the authors share what partnerships in six projects from Canada, Netherlands, and United Kingdom looked like, so that others can be inspired.


The authors found that all projects had the same beliefs important to partnerships, like having respect for each other. Young people could work on parts of the project they liked in a way that worked for them. They were supported by staff, could join meetings and were appreciated for their work. Clear communication during and in-between meetings was helpful. Youth were often asked about the role they wanted in the project. While there was often no formal training on how to do research, there were many opportunities to learn.


The recommendations for researchers and young people who want to partner together include: (1) It is okay to not know what the partnership will look like and there is no single recipe of how to partner; (2) Take your time; (3) Discuss how the partnership is going; (4) Think about who is doing what and why; (5) Consider the diversity in the background of young partners in research.


Authors: Nguyen, L., van Oort, B., Davis, H., van der Meulen, E., Dawe-McCord, C., Franklin, A., Gorter, J. W., Morris, C., & Ketelaar, M. (2022). Research Involvement and Engagement, 8(1), 62. doi: 10.1186/s40900-022-00400-7

Outcomes management practices in tiered school-based speech-language therapy: A Canadian example. 


In this qualitative study, we interviewed 24 senior SLPs and SLP managers from across Ontario school boards about how they determine that services are working and making an impact. SLPs reported many important impacts of services for students, school staff and families, as well as school operations. However, there were few ways to appropriately measure this impact.


Determining the impacts of services was easiest when SLPs could work as a team to evaluate their services, and when teachers and families noticed valuable impacts on student learning and well-being.


The next step is to identify which of these impacts are most important to all stakeholders so that we can prioritize impact assessment development.


Authors: Cahill, P. T., Ng, S. L., Dix, L., Ferro, M. A., Turkstra, L. S., & Campbell, W. N. (2022). International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1111/1460-6984.12822

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