Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada has supported efforts across the country to guide action on fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, or FASD. Through the FASD initiative, the Public Health Agency of Canada, or PHAC, undertakes three main activities: leadership, coordination and collaboration; development of the evidence base; and facilitation of knowledge exchange. The FASD national strategic projects fund, the NSPF, supports national, time-limited projects to support these activities. Since 2014-15, the federal government has allocated $1.5 million annually, for a total of $12 million over the past eight years.
The Government of Canada has funded projects through the NSPF to support the development of Canadian FASD diagnostic guidelines across the lifespan and of a national screening toolkit for individuals with FASD, as well as training programs for parents and caregivers, frontline service providers and health care professionals. The NSPF has also supported projects working to expand the scientific and social knowledge relevant to health promotion and prevention of FASD by funding studies on prevalence and the development of a FASD database to collect information on FASD diagnoses in Canada. The NSPF is currently supporting projects that promote education and awareness; harm reduction approaches for those at high risk of having a child prenatally exposed to alcohol and other substances; and research into the social determinants of health that impact alcohol consumption and FASD. Through the Centre for Surveillance and Applied Research, PHAC is also piloting system models for FASD prevalence estimation, with a view to identifying proper surveillance approaches for FASD.
The results of these efforts include funding projects that have supported the prevention of FASD and the reduction of stigma associated with FASD. Projects funded through the NSPF reached an audience of individuals who are pregnant or may become pregnant, individuals with FASD, service providers and policy-makers.
In 2020-21, project activities included dissemination of and training on the 2016 FASD diagnostic guidelines; the continued development of a national database of FASD diagnostic data collected from clinics across Canada; the development of guidelines for practitioners to use in screening and talking to people who are pregnant or might become pregnant about alcohol use during pregnancy; the collection of longitudinal data on participant outcomes from the eight level 3 FASD holistic prevention programs across Canada; community outreach to support the development of a toolkit; modification, cultural adaptation, and translation of a school-based FASD education and prevention curriculum to be taught in Canada; the promotion of FASD prevention in Inuit communities, four land claim regions and three urban centres: Ottawa, Edmonton and Montreal; and a bilingual awareness campaign to prevent alcohol consumption during pregnancy and to address stigma associated with FASD.