Ann Douglas will be one of the featured presenters at the Children's Mental Health Ontario conference in Toronto in late November.
Session description: A Gateway to FamilySmart™ Evidence: No one person, no one service – all together for child and youth
mental health.
Presenters: Keli Anderson, Co-Founder - The F.O.R.C.E. Society for Kids’ Mental Health and Co-Founder, President & CEO, National Institute of Families for Child & Youth Mental Health Institute of Families for Child & Youth Mental Health; Ann Douglas, author and columnist; Jana Davidson, Vice-President Medical Affairs & Psychiatrist-in-Chief, Children’s & Women’s Mental Health Programs, BC Children’s Hospital, and Clinical Professor and Head of the Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry at UBC BC Children’s Hospital
This session will take participants on a journey to discover how the Child and Youth Mental Health and Substance Use Collaborative in British Columbia (BC) is transforming child and youth mental health and substance use services in the province and setting new standards for family engagement (a FamilySmart™ standard). The BC Family Smart Network is based on collaborative “peer-to-peer” and “expert-to-expert” methods to bring the expertise of youth and families with lived experience directly to researchers, policy makers, and service
providers. These collaborations are transforming the quality and effectiveness of services for children and youth with mental health or substance use challenges. Participants will learn more about the ground-breaking work being done in family engagement, in addition to ways of informing to empowering families as partners, which has the potential to spark a revolution in care and improve the mental wellness of children and youth.
Objectives:
• Discover how FamilySmart is a partnership between families, service providers and decision makers;
• Understand how work in BC can influence practice in other provinces;
• Reinforce how families and service providers can come together in the co-creation and delivery of services beyond what they may have thought;
• Encourage service providers and others to reflect on their own practice and seek ways to engage and partner with families in enhancing their practice.