We started out under the department of psychiatry. They came, when I was doing my fellowship with Dr. Katzman at SickKids, to view various programs to determine the best model.
The uniqueness of the Calgary eating disorder program is that we see all ages, and so we had to develop a program that went initially all the way from as young as seven years old, unfortunately, to 24 years of age. Over the last eight years, we've been seeing all ages. You can imagine the complexity of trying to have a program that reaches all ages.
As a pediatrician joining the team about two months into the initial program while it was continuing to develop, I had a concern around the developmental appropriateness of mixing all ages. They then decided to have the programming for those ages 14 and up. What then happened was that we missed the under-14 population for intense programming.
It took a lot of years and a lot of showing of the evidence base for family-based treatment, as well as other approaches, such as the multi-family from Eisler in England, to convince them that it was really important to have specialized programming for the under-14 group and for many of the adolescents.
It has been a work in progress. There has been an amazing partnership and collaboration between the department of psychiatry and the department of pediatrics. Now that we have the evidence for some of the family-based programs we do for the younger groups and also for some of the other work that we're doing with adults, I think we are developing a centre of excellence.