Overview

With the rise of child and youth substance use in British Columbia (BC), health professionals must have access to up-to-date training, resources and emerging evidence to assess and manage their patients.

Feedback from health professionals indicates a lack of confidence in identifying and managing child and youth substance use.

To address the need to provide timely care to a vulnerable population of youth aged ten to 25, UBC CPD has partnered with the Shared Care Child and Youth Mental Health and Substance Use (CYMHSU) Community of Practice Working Group, to create a pathway for primary care providers to use to guide them in their work with children and youth on this topic.  

A clinical care pathway

The Child and Youth Substance Use Pathway highlights youth-specific communication strategies to help navigate youths’ confidentiality while facilitating family involvement and age-specific screening tools for substance use and mental health. Youth are a heterogenous population, so clinical recommendations are organized by stages of cognitive development (early adolescence to young adulthood) and psychosocial complexity (from low to high complexity across six domains). This pathway is hosted on Pathways BC.  

Education delivery

A webinar was hosted to raise awareness of this pathway in June 2024 and two pilot case-based workshops were held in Vancouver in October 2024. The next phase of this project involves partnering with the Health Data Coalition (HDC) to further enhance the reach of this pathway by creating an online module and hosting in-community small group learning sessions across BC.

The online module will showcase the youth substance use pathway and be available to all health professionals. Small group workshops will use this module as a pre-learning exercise and deliver in-community sessions to ensure local resources are highlighted. The online module and learning sessions will be available to family physicians, nurse practitioners, counsellors, pediatricians, psychiatrists, residents and medical students in the fall of 2025.  

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Partnerships

This project is in collaboration with the Child and Youth Mental Health and Substance Use (CYMHSU) Community of Practice Working Group, the Health Data Coalition (HDC).