That's a great question. Thank you very much for the question.
What we're seeing in other communities is the need for a more coordinated approach. My own work is largely in Drayton Valley, an Albertan community, one of the Canadian communities heavily reliant on oil and gas. What we're learning from those communities, as well as from indigenous communities, is that we need to be thinking about children's lives in a more total way, including recreational spaces, access to green spaces, access to safe water, access to the health care professionals we're hearing about on this particular panel, better coordination and access to child care for families, etc.
I think sometimes what happens is that when we have a mass dislocation or problem, we tend to focus in very quickly on a particular solution, like education, speech-language, teeth or whatever. What we're actually seeing in our research is that the more we are able to co-locate and think about a child's life in its totality....
For instance, I'll give you a very small example. It's not really a child example, but in Fort McMurray there was a big effort to get insurance adjusters to respond to the families who were dislocated after the large fire that occurred. The insurance adjuster became part of a mental health team, in a sense, because when you get people's insurance claims settled very quickly, families can relocate back to the community and people can get back to work. Indeed, family cohesion and children's mental health are better protected when their parents are back at work, houses are re-established, homes are re-established and communities are re-established. Sometimes we tend to partialize this. We tend to think, “Oh, let's just get a psychologist to visit the family.”
I'm a mental health professional, but we miss the fact that without these other coordinated services, trauma tends to persist. Sometimes it's these other allied services. For instance, we know that a child who is better diagnosed as having speech language issues is better ready earlier, is better ready for school, and will have a higher school achievement throughout their life.
We need to get out of this idea that we keep funding single solutions in isolation from others. I think what happened in Fort McMurray is simply another example of how we will get better long-term outcomes when we think more holistically.