A partnership struck by the Faculty of Health Sciences, the City of Ottawa Public Health and the Coalition of Community Health and Resource Centres of Ottawa is behind a two-year pilot program called Growing Healthy: Connecting Services to Families with Young Children.
The new program, launched in January, aims to provide accessible, preventive early childhood health and social services to priority families with young children. “Priority families” include those headed by adolescents or low-income single mothers, whose first language is neither English nor French, and/or are members of cultural minorities, such as new Canadians and Aboriginal peoples.
The program aims to improve connections between preventive services offered by Ottawa Public Health and the Coalition of Community Health and Resource Centres for families with children from birth to age six and to provide a greater understanding about the experiences of those families who are currently “falling through the cracks” of the system. The program will build upon the community services available to families. It will also facilitate more timely access to a set of preventive early childhood services, such as prenatal programs, breastfeeding education, parental information, and monitoring of growth and developmental milestones.
Wendy Peterson and Dawn Smith, assistant professors in the School of Nursing and co-principal investigators for Growing Healthy, are taking a lead role in the design and oversight of the evaluation of research for the project. Both Peterson and Smith are also research associates with the University’s Community Health Research Unit.
“The need to reduce disparities in early childhood development outcomes is well recognized,” says Peterson. “However, there has been little research examining the effectiveness of inter-organizational interventions aimed at improving priority families’ health care experiences and access to care. This project will address that concern.”
The importance of the project is underscored by Smith: “The opportunity to build academic and community partnerships to develop and test interventions, which can improve population health is good news for us.” She adds, “Canada has identified a gap in capacity for population health intervention research, and this project is unique in that organizations are willing to make the structural changes necessary to remove barriers to participation by the groups in our community who most need the services.”
Two Community Health and Resource Centres – Carlington Community and Health Services and the Overbrook-Forbes Community Resource Centre – were selected for the pilot project. The decision was based on the neighbourhoods’ location, percentage of babies who experience low birth-weight, and percentage of children who fall below the average early development instrument (EDI) indicators at age five.
Growing Healthy is funded by the City of Ottawa, Adobe Systems Incorporated, Ontario Trillium Foundation and the United Way.
