CHILDREN's Healthcare Canada, Ottawa, 2025

From April 13-15, STIC lab members Sarah Keeping (PhD in Nursing Student) and Grace MacIntyre (Research Assistant) attended at the Children’s Healthcare Canada conference in Ottawa.  

This conference is hosted annually to bring together health leaders and executives, frontline practitioners, patient and family partners, researchers, and policy makers. Children’s Health Canada is a national association that supports the implementation of high-quality care, unites strategic partners, and advocates to improve child and youth health and health systems. This year’s conference focused on right-sizing health systems. Right-sizing is about ensuring we invest in and design health systems to meet the needs of children, youth, and families. A right-sized health system provides accessible, equitable, and connected health services.  

Sarah presented a poster for a scoping review she is leading on " The structure and implementation of school-based nursing programs for children with special health care needs (CSHCN)”. Grace presented a poster on the “IWK’s Transition to Adult Care Framework: Integrating a coordinated, consistent structure into transition practice”, on behalf of the IWK Transition of Care Committee.  
Work was presented by healthcare leaders and researchers from throughout all of Canada. The panels and concurrent sessions touched on timely topics such as precision medicine, artificial intelligence, political determinants of health, and learning health systems.   The keynote speaker, Dr. Tina Cheng, discussed strategies to improve lifelong health for children, emphasizing the need for a patient, family and public health-oriented model of pediatric care.  

Some of the key takeaways and taglines of the conference included that: 

• Today’s systems were designed for yesterday’s kids.  

• Investing in the health of children is investing in our collective future. 

• We need to move beyond the health system to help children thrive. This involves building relationships with rural communities, Indigenous communities, schools, community organizations, and government and private sectors.  

• To support a successful learning health system approach, research questions should stem from and be tailored to local context, whether through internal data or experiential knowledge.  

• More and more health systems are leveraging data such as patient reported outcome measures and social determinants of health to enhance the quality-of-care delivery and health equity. We have to ensure this data is used for solutions, not profiling. Contextualizing and making meaning of the data must be a collaborative process between clinicians and patients and families.  

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This was a great opportunity for Sarah and Grace to make connections and learn about the innovative work happening for youth and children’s health!  
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