Impact of COVID-19 on social work field education: Perspectives of Canadian social work students.

Summary: Social work field education has experienced major disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, while also embracing new opportunities to grow. The Transforming the Field Education Landscape research partnership developed a cross-sectional web-based survey with closed- and open-ended questions to understand student perceptions of COVID-19's impacts on social work field education. The survey opened during the first wave of the pandemic from July 8 to 29, 2020 and was completed by 367 Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) and Master of Social Work (MSW) students across Canada. Quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Findings: Respondents experienced reduced practicum hours and placements terminating early or moving online. Students were concerned about gaining adequate experience for future job prospects. They were generally positive about academic institutional responses to COVID-19 but described financial challenges with tuition costs and a lack of paid practica. Respondents were mostly satisfied with practicum supervision. They experienced negative impacts of COVID-19 on mental health with isolation and remote learning and described a lack of institutional mental health support. Students were concerned with missing direct practice skills, while some students reported more flexible hours, access to online events beyond their region, and increased research experience. They expressed a need for practicum flexibility and accommodation. Applications: Recommendations include an increase in flexibility and accommodations for practicum students, exchanges of promising and wise field education practices, and accessible postsecondary mental health supports. Professional development opportunities should support graduates who missed learning opportunities in their practicum.

Time to act: Early experience suggests stabilization care offers a feasible approach for adolescents after acute life-threatening opioid toxicity.

British Columbia is the epicentre of the opioid crisis in North America. Illicit drug toxicity is now one of the top 3 causes of death for adolescents in British Columbia. Evidence informed treatment is available but adolescents rarely receive it. Non-fatal toxicity can provide an opportunity to intervene. Since 2018, paediatricians in British Columbia have been offering admission, involuntary if necessary, to adolescents presenting to hospital after a life-threatening illicit drug toxicity. This brief stay, termed "stabilization care," offers medical and psychiatric assessments, withdrawal management and initiation of opioid agonist therapy and discharge planning. Hospital policies, procedures and protocols were revised to support the unique needs of this population. Early experience with 17 adolescents shows relatively high attachment to treatment services and opioid agonist treatment, suggesting that paediatric interdisciplinary teams, working strategically, can improve care for adolescents in the face of the opioid epidemic.

Stigma in relation to families living with parental mental illness: An integrative review.

Stigma is a pervasive social mechanism with negative ramifications for people who experience mental illness. Less is known about the stigma experiences of families where a parent has a mental illness. This review aims to identify and synthesize evidence on the concept of stigma and stigma-related experiences and outcomes reported by parents and children living with parental mental illness. An integrative review method was employed, with PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses) guidelines to search and select literature and extract and analyse data. This approach allows for inclusion of theoretical and empirical literature and for concept definition. Fifty-eight papers, mostly from the USA, Australia, and the UK, met the inclusion criteria. Stigma was primarily conceptualized in families as a marked difference that was negatively appraised, and which could be internalized. Some articles examined how underpinning assumptions could shape the behaviour of individuals and groups and be embedded within social institutions and structures. For parents, mental illness stigma was interconnected with stigma relating to perceived violations of social and cultural norms related to parenting. Children's experience of stigma resulted in bullying, embarrassment, guilt and social isolation, and efforts to conceal their parent's mental illness. One outcome was that stigma prevented children and parents from seeking much needed supports. Public health policies and campaigns that focus exclusively on promoting open disclosure of mental illness to foster community education outcomes are unlikely to be effective without additional strategies aimed at preventing and redressing the structural impacts of stigma for all family members.

Professionals' Perspectives on Viewing Child Sexual Abuse Images to Improve Response to Victims.

The complexity of the phenomenon of child sexual abuse images online (CSAIO) benefits from cross-disciplinary collaboration across law enforcement, child protection, and children's mental health. Through focus groups with professionals working in these fields, this article focuses on when and whether professionals who work with child sexual abuse cases should be exposed to viewing CSAIO and if so under what circumstances doing so would benefit investigations and support services for victims. In a broader sense, this article is about professional experience, decision making, training, and collaboration around a particularly difficult professional experience, namely exposure to viewing CSAIO.

Enacting Firm, Fair and Friendly Practice: A Model for Strengths-Based Child Protection Relationships?

Strengths-based solution-focused approaches are gaining ground in statutory child protection work, but few studies have asked front line practitioners how they navigate the complex worker-client relationships such approaches require. This paper describes one component of a mixed-methods study in a large Canadian statutory child protection agency in which 225 workers described how they applied the ideas of strengths-based practice in their daily work. Interviews with twenty-four practitioners were analysed using an interpretive description approach. Only four interviewees appeared to successfully enact a version of strengths-based practice that closely mirrored those described by key strengths-based child protection theorists and was fully congruent with their mandated role. They described navigating a shifting balance of collaboration and authority in worker-client relationships based on transparency, impartial judgement, attentiveness to the worker-client interaction and the value that clients were fellow human beings. Their accounts extend current conceptualisations of the worker-client relationship in strengths-based child protection work and are congruent with current understandings of effective mandated relationships. They provide what may be a useful model to help workers understand and navigate relationships in which they must reconcile their own authority and expertise with genuine support for the authority and expertise of their clients.

Which strengths-based practice? Reconciling strengths-based practice and mandated authority in child protection work.

The recent application of strengths-based practice in child protection settings has been accompanied by evidence of inconsistent implementation and concerns that the approach is incompatible with statutory work. Few studies have moved beyond asking whether child protection workers are implementing strengths-based practice to explore why the approach is enacted as it is. This article describes a mixed methods study using an online survey and interviews to elicit from 225 statutory child protection workers in a large Canadian agency how they applied strengths-based ideas and why they did what they did. The authors found that although strengths-based practice was popular, 70 percent of participants believed that it was not always applicable to child protection work. Participants described five distinct versions of the approach, only one of which was fully congruent with their mandated role. The study suggests that the common conflation of strengths-based and solution-focused approaches ignores important differences in the conceptualization of practitioner authority and leaves practitioners attempting to implement versions ofstrengths-based practice that do not fit statutory child protection work. Only when practitioners choose solution-focused models that support their use of mandated authority is consistent implementation a reasonable expectation.

The Interprofessional Psychosocial Oncology Distance Education (IPODE) project: perceived outcomes of an approach to healthcare professional education.

The Interprofessional Psychosocial Oncology Distance Education (IPODE) project was designed as an approach to the problems of feasibility and accessibility in specialty health professional education, in this case, psychosocial oncology (PSO). In this article, we report the evaluation findings from the first three years of the project in relation to one IPODE course, which was offered as a graduate level university elective in nine Canadian universities and as a continuing education (CE) option to health professionals between January 2008 and May 2010. The evaluation included a pre and post questionnaire that explored how an interprofessional (IP), web-based, PSO course influenced participants' knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about IP, person-centered PSO care. It also examined what attributes of a web-based platform were most effective in delivering an IP PSO course. The study yielded two key findings. First, web-based learning in a pan-Canadian and cross-university collaboration is a viable alternative to providing specialty education and significantly improves knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about IP, person-centered PSO care. Second, a web-based platform with real-time seminars, discussion boards and multiple audio visual resources that privilege first person illness narratives were important elements in expanding knowledge and shifting attitudes about IP practice and person-centered care in regards to PSO. In their evaluation, course participants highlighted a variety of ways in which the course expanded their vision about what constitutes an IP team and increased their confidence in interacting with healthcare professionals from professions other than their own.

'On the same level': facilitators' experiences running a drug user-led safer injecting education campaign.

BACKGROUND: Unsafe injection practices play a major role in elevated rates of morbidity and mortality among people who inject drugs (IDU). There is growing interest in the direct involvement of IDU in interventions that seek to address unsafe injecting. This study describes a drug user-led safer injecting education campaign, and explores facilitators' experiences delivering educational workshops. METHODS: We conducted semi-structured qualitative interviews with 8 members of the Injection Support (IS) Team who developed and facilitated a series of safer injecting education workshops. Interviews explored facilitator's perceptions of the workshops, experiences being a facilitator, and perspectives on the educational campaign. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and a thematic analysis was conducted. RESULTS: IS Team facilitators described how the workshop's structure and content enabled effective communication of information about safer injecting practices, while targeting the unsafe practices of workshop participants. Facilitators' identity as IDU enhanced their ability to relate to workshop participants and communicate educational messages in language accessible to workshop participants. Facilitators reported gaining knowledge and skills from their involvement in the campaign, as well as positive feelings about themselves from the realization that they were helping people to protect their health. Overall, facilitators felt that this campaign provided IDU with valuable information, although facilitators also critiqued the campaign and suggested improvements for future efforts. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrates the feasibility of involving IDU in educational initiatives targeting unsafe injecting. Findings illustrate how IDU involvement in prevention activities improves relevance and cultural appropriateness of interventions while providing individual, social, and professional benefits to those IDU delivering education.

Comparing differential responses within child protective services: a longitudinal examination.

This study examines the efficacy of a family differential response program to lower rates of (1) reentry into child protective services (CPS) and (2) child removal. Data were collected over 20 months from one region of British Columbia, Canada. Comparisons between family development response (FDR) and cases assigned to regular investigation (INV) suggest that FDR does not decrease recidivism to CPS. However, fewer children in the FDR group were removed than children in the INV group.

The University of British Columbia model of interprofessional education.

The College of Health Disciplines, at the University of British Columbia (UBC) has a long history of developing interprofessional learning opportunities for students and practitioners. Historically, many of the courses and programmes were developed because they intuitively made sense or because certain streams of funding were available at particular times. While each of them fit generally within our understanding of interprofessional education in the health and human service education programs, they were not systematically developed within an educational or theoretical framework. This paper discusses the model we have subsequently developed at the College for conceptualizing the various types of interprofessional experiences offered at UBC. It has been developed so that we can offer the broadest range of courses and most effective learning experiences for our students. Our model is based on the premise that there are optimal learning times for health and human services students (and practitioners) depending upon their stage of development as professionals in their respective disciplines and their readiness to learn and develop new perspectives on professional interaction.

Impact of an interprofessional rural health care practice education experience on students and communities.

The Interprofessional Rural Program of British Columbia (IRPBC) was established in 2003 as a pilot program aimed at supporting the recruitment of health and human service professionals to rural communities in British Columbia, Canada. The program was designed to expose students in the health and human service professions to rural communities and to assess whether this exposure increased the likelihood of their return to work in nonurban settings once they completed their studies. The initial qualitative evaluation of IRPBC was conducted via individual interviews in the first year and written questionnaires in the second year. In general, IRPBC was perceived by the participants to have had a significant impact on the students and communities. The students who participated in it benefited not only from the chance to engage in rural practice but also from the opportunity to interact within an interprofessional context; and the communities participating in the program profited from enhanced health care and the possibility of attracting new practitioners from these students. Exposure to new ways of providing service and the impact that the introduction of teams of passionate students can have on both practitioners and small communities have greatly enriched the broader communities.

The Interprofessional Rural Program of British Columbia (IRPbc).

The Interprofessional Rural Program of British Columbia IRPbc was established in 2003 as an important first step for the Province of British Columbia, Canada, in creating a collaborative interprofessional education initiative that engages numerous communities, health authorities and post-secondary institutions in working toward a common goal. Designed to foster interprofessional education and promote rural recruitment of health professionals, the program places teams of students from a number of health professional programs into rural and remote British Columbia communities. In addition to meeting their discipline specific learning objectives, the student teams are provided with the opportunity to experience the challenges of rural life and practice and advance their interprofessional competence. To date, 62 students have participated in the program from nursing, social work, medicine, physical therapy, occupational therapy, pharmaceutical sciences, speech language pathology, audiology, laboratory technology, and counseling psychology. While not without numerous struggles and challenges, IRPbc has been successful in meeting the program mandate. It has also had a number of positive outcomes not anticipated at the time the program was established.

Sheway's services for substance using pregnant and parenting women: evaluating the outcomes for infants.

Sheway is a single-access comprehensive street-front service to pregnant and parenting women with a history of alcohol and/or drug abuse that is located in one of Canada's poorest neighbourhoods, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. This investigation assesses the concurrent health and social problems clients report upon entry into the program, service utilization, and the impact of services on neonate and infant well-being. Data were collected through the review of files from the 9 1/2 years of the agency's service. Findings suggest that the clients' concurrent health and social problems have increased over the years of operation while indicators of infant health have either improved or maintained steady rates.