Child Rights Education for Health Professionals (Boulton Initiative)

The Boulton Initiative (BI) is a project which seeks to provide a strategy for educating health professionals around the use of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in practice. It is dedicated to promoting the well-being, health and development of children through establishing, infusing, and sustaining a child rights approach in child and youth focused health professional education and services. Involvement in this initiative is in keeping with CCYHC’s mandate and the Coalition has become a national partner supporting its planning and implementation. 

The Boulton Initiative is in a partnership with the international Child Rights Education for Professionals (CRED-PRO) program of the International Institute for Child Rights and Development (University of Victoria, British Columbia).  CRED-PRO has produced and tested a methodology for the development of culturally-applicable child rights education for health professionals.  The BI intends to refine, strengthen, and augment this model as it is applied in different cultures and countries globally to be implemented in a manner specifically appropriate for Canada.

Through the voluntary contributions of time and expertise of health and child rights specialists; funding support from Public Health Agency Canada and the B.C. Children’s Hospital Department of Paediatrics; and the supportive interest of the Canadian Paediatric Society and the Canadian Child & Youth Health Coalition; a series of early planning sessions, information programs, and exploratory research were conducted as definitive first steps in this endeavor. 

An initial organizational and planning meeting for the Initiative was held March 28-29, 2008 that was sponsored by the Department of Paediatrics (UBC & BC Children’s Hospital) and IICRD. It had financial support from the Public Health Agency of Canada. Other stakeholders included the Canadian Paediatric Society, UBC family practice medicine, the Canadian Child & Youth Health Coalition, and the Society for Children and Youth of BC.  At this meeting an advisory council was established and plans were made for carrying the Boulton Initiativeforward through close cooperation between paediatrics, family practice medicine, and nursing. As well, the planning team began to construct and engage with steering, education & curriculum, partners, First Nations, and child/youth consultation committees.

Over the course of 2009 through funding support from the Public Health Agency of Canada supplemented by support from the UBC Department of Pediatrics, a national plan (see link below) has been developed to advance child rights education in the health care sector.  The plan emphasizes assessment, planning and building on current programs to integrate a child rights approach in child health education, policies, and practices.  It sets the expectation for making a child rights orientation a pervading component of, and influence in, pre-service and in-service training and train-the-trainer for health professionals.  It envisions a national network of professionals working with a regionally and culturally adapted curriculum and articulated program.  Over and above the focus on infusing the child rights approach through the training highlighted above, of particular importance is the development of plans for integration of child rights into health policy and a model of accountability for monitoring and evaluation of a child rights approach for the Canadian child/youth health sector.

» The Boulton Initiative: A Child Rights Approach to Canadian Health Services

A subsequent grant application is in preparation to the Public Health Agency of Canada to begin the implementation of this plan.  This will include support for establishing a national advisory committee of child health professionals (pediatrics, family medicine, nursing, child psychiatry and Psychology) to guide an across-Canada survey to evaluate existing child rights education for health professionals and assess the gaps in the education for health professionals, development of a national generic child rights curriculum for health professionals and adapted to the different health specialties noted above, and the hosting of a meeting in Vancouver that would bring together the national representatives of this initiative.