The Price of Love: Understanding the Financial and Psychosocial Costs of Caring for Children with Medical Complexities.

Parents of children with medical complexities (CMCs) report significant challenges affecting their financial, emotional and social well-being in relation to caring for their child's medical needs. The Complex Care Navigator Program was designed to provide social, emotional and economic support to parents of CMCs. This paper describes the results and outcomes of the program and the challenges experienced during the evaluation process. Overall, results suggest that the program had a positive impact on the parents' psychosocial functioning and social connections. The results demonstrate the importance of providing early screening, psychosocial intervention and peer support.

Helping Families Thrive: Co-Designing a Program to Support Parents of Children with Medical Complexity.

Families of children with medical complexity (CMC) face significant challenges beyond those related to caring for their child's medical condition. Parents of CMC report a variety of concerns impacting their social, emotional and financial well-being. This paper details how CHEO, community organizations and parents co-designed and evaluated the Navigator Program. Through system navigation, peer support and knowledge navigation, the program offers emotional, social and economic support for parents struggling to keep up with the demands of having CMC. A best practices toolkit also provides resources to help others better support these unique families locally, provincially and nationally.

It's About Time: Rapid Implementation of a Hub-and-Spoke Care Delivery Model for Tertiary-Integrated Complex Care Services in a Northern Ontario Community.

Children with medical complexity (CMC) in rural and northern communities have more difficulty accessing subspecialty health providers than those in urban centres. This article describes an alignment cascade in which leaders engaged peers and staff to rapidly roll out the implementation of a sustainably designed complex care model, integrated in the Champlain Complex Care Program and delivered in Timmins, Ontario. The Provincial Council for Maternal and Child Health's Complex Care for Kids Ontario (CCKO) strategy supports the implementation and expansion of a hub-and-spoke model of interprofessional complex care for CMC and their families. A nurse practitioner is the primary point of contact for the family and oversees coordination and integration of care; regional CCKO programs are committed to building capacity to provide safe, high-quality care for CMC in communities closer to their homes.