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Purpose: The COVID-19 pandemic led to major service disruptions in the healthcare sector, especially regarding sexual and reproductive health services. However, the impact of the pandemic on Canadian adolescents is relatively unknown. This study aimed to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health measures on the sexual and reproductive health (SRH) of adolescents in Alberta, Canada. Methods: A qualitative study using an interpretive description (ID) approach and community-based participatory research principles was conducted to capture the subjective experience and perceptions of adolescents and service providers. With the collaboration of the Adolescent Advisory Group and community partners, 18 adolescents and 15 service providers were recruited for the study through purposive sampling. Findings from the qualitative interviews were analyzed using thematic analysis. Results: Three major themes emerged from the analysis: (1) COVID-19 SRH experience, (2) barriers to SRH, and (3) adolescent SRH strategies. Our findings highlight numerous barriers and challenges that prevented adolescents from accessing SRH education, products, and services. Conclusion: The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound impact on the SRH and the well-being of adolescents. Our study reflects the need for diverse SRH strategies to maintain continued access to SRH resources during disruptive events, such as the pandemic. Plain language summary: Access to sexual and reproductive health (SRH) services is a basic human right. All individuals require access to appropriate SRH services to maintain their optimal sexual and reproductive health. Adolescents require special guidance, support, and youth-friendly services in matters of SRH as they enter puberty and explore their sexual identity. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many health and SRH services were suspended. Access to SRH products and services became difficult due to public health restrictions, which has possible negative consequences for adolescents' SRH. The experiences of adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic regarding their SRH are not reported in Alberta, Canada. Therefore, we explored the impacts of these public health restrictions on adolescents' SRH. We performed qualitative interviews with adolescents and SRH service providers to know their perspectives on how the pandemic influenced the SRH of adolescents. This paper provides insights into the barriers faced by adolescents while accessing SRH services during the pandemic, as well as their perceptions of digital strategies, such as mobile applications, and other recommendations for supporting SRH education and services. Based on the study findings, an adolescent-friendly mobile application will be developed to provide a virtual platform connecting adolescents to SRH educational resources, services, and support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how the power wielded by regional incumbents has impacted subnational innovation agendas. Our findings suggest that the design of mission-oriented innovation policies should be more attentive to regional innovation policies and their relationship to how innovation may serve to bolster incumbents and not undermine them. We use a case-study of innovation in fossil fuels. Recently, innovation policy literature has explored innovation policy and global climate as a major topic. On the one hand, carbon lock-in has been used to explain why there has been such difficulty in reducing carbon emissions, in many cases, despite an increasing emphasis of mission-innovation policies. On the other hand, mission-innovation policies are believed to be a key to the development of disruptive innovations that could break this carbon intensive path dependency. Although the two literatures explore the same problem, there could be more integration. While carbon lock-in is being considered in the mission-innovation literature, it nevertheless has been largely overlooked at the mission-setting stage. On the other hand, the lock-in literature has tended to overlook the findings of mission-oriented innovation literature in offering solutions, which suggests that there is a more productive role for mission-oriented innovations in breaking free of previous constraints to serve in the low-carbon energy transition. To make our case, we argue it is important to distinguish among the various impacts disruptive innovations have on the market shares of incumbents'. We propose the following three schema: new market, market rewarding and market destroying. By variegating the potential impact of innovations, we suggest that mission-oriented innovation polices may be designed to only support certain types of innovations that do not directly undermine the market share of incumbents. Using a detailed case study of the Province of Alberta, Canada, we then explore the role of the province's mission-oriented policy in the development of technology to produce the Canadian oil sands. The case study illustrates how incumbents influenced the establishment and direction of the mission's goal. Shifts in incumbency opposition toward the province's mission-oriented innovation policy coincided with the changing impact of the innovation from being market destroying to market rewarding. We suggest that future research should be more attentive to the role of incumbents in influencing mission-oriented innovation policy and the importance of their influence at the mission-setting stage. Furthermore, we suggest that to meet the grand challenge of addressing climate change through mission-oriented innovation policies, these policies must be designed to break free of these institutional constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of school reforms to advance reconciliation with Indigenous peoples provides an opportunity to explore what Canadians think is important in framing their identities and values. This paper draws on data from a survey of public perspectives on education for reconciliation activities in two Canadian provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan. We consider the broader community context within which schools are located. By examining public perspectives, we are able to assess how curricular initiatives related to reconciliation are understood by community members, both as a priority in itself and in relation to other key curricular areas. Informed by critical race theory, our findings suggest that reconciliation is restricted to activities that do not involve extensive change to existing curricular and ideational frameworks. These perspectives exist alongside extensive opposition to reconciliation justified by claims that Indigenous experiences and perspectives are receiving undue attention relative to more pressing educational priorities. Our findings suggest that aims to transform dominant understandings about Canadian history and identity remain far from being fulfilled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides insights into the little‐explored gendered perspective of the parenting practices of Somali immigrant mothers in a Canadian province (Alberta). We use a critical ethnographic methodology and a transnational feminist framework. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted with ten Somali mothers aged 18 to 50. Mothers were interviewed about their parenting practices in a post‐migration context, including challenges. Our results show immigrant mothers combine their cultural values with new values from Canada that they find effective. We find gendered differences in how parenting experiences are perceived. Our results suggest the need for anti‐racist and culturally safe health, education, and child policies and practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are one of the most frequently studied injuries in orthopedic care and research. However, limited epidemiological data are available in Canada regarding trend and distribution of anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR). In this paper, our purpose was to assess trends of ACLR between 2002/03 and 2018/19 by age, sex, season of surgery, and location (inpatient vs outpatient) of surgery. Methods: In this descriptive epidemiological study of retrospective data available from Alberta Ministry of Health, we report annual incidence of ACLR between 2002/03 until 2018/19 among Albertans aged 10 years and older. Information was collected by authors from physician claims database for primary ACLR and revision ACLR and linked with other databases. Incidence proportions (number of ACLR/100,000 population) were calculated and compared by age category and gender over the study period. Results: A total of 28,401 primary ACLR and 2085 revision ACLR were identified during the study period. Age-standardized annual incidence of primary ACLR increased from 40.6 to 51.2 per 100,000 population aged 10 years and older. Average annual increase in ACLR incidence was higher among females (1.8% per years) compared to males (0.96% per year). The overall peak incidence and peak incidence among males was observed in 20–29 year age group, whereas peak incidence in females was observed in 10–19 years of age. The number of ACLR in females outnumbers those among males for 10–19 year age group. Generally, a lower proportion of ACLR were conducted in summer compared to other seasons. Primary ACLR conducted in outpatient setting increased from 72% in 2002/03 to 97% in 2018/19. Conclusion: The incidence of ACLR is increasing in Alberta, especially among females and among younger cohorts under 20 years of age. This information can help clinicians to provide patient education and policy-makers to design and implement targeted ACL injury prevention programs. Level of evidence: Level III. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing aging population in Canada has multi-faceted psycho-social needs. Social workers are well-positioned to address these needs, despite many challenges. This paper reports findings from the World Café at the Gerontology Symposium in Alberta, Canada, held in 2018. The goal was to learn from social work practitioners, researchers, and educators (N = 49) about current and future needs of gerontological social work in Alberta. There were two research questions: 1) What strategies do social workers need on the micro, mezzo, and macro levels to help better serve the growing older adult population in Alberta? (R1) 2) How can social workers promote the value and contribution of gerontological social work within the interprofessional community? (R2) The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis. Ten R1-related themes emerged: personal traits of a social worker; professional skills; bio-psycho-social needs of older adults; community connections; access to benefits; gerontological social work education; integrated healthcare; aging policy; ageism; and advocacy to strengthen the voice of older adults. The three R2-related themes include strengthening the status of the social work profession; building trust through demonstrated skills; and interprofessional education and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport and education organizations have established models to ensure that coaches and teachers understand the physical, social, emotional and mental development of children. Such pathways of intentionally designed models fail to exist in the recreation sector where many physical activity (PA) programs are mainly developed based on convenience and instructor availability rather than on established credentials and current pedagogy practices. Addressing this gap, this paper explores the creation of an intentionally designed model of programming for children's structured recreation, which is defined as sport or PA-based programs that are planned and led by an instructor. This proposed model is contextualized within the province of Alberta, but may be applicable across the nation. The authors further define "intentionally designed" as the development of purposeful programming with specific objectives that align with outside sources. One such source comes from the Canadian Parks and Recreation Association, who has created a Canadian Recreation Framework, an initiative to ultimately develop the well-being of all Canadians. The proposed, structured recreation model also incorporates several guiding principles including physical literacy and sport philosophy. Physical Literacy (PL) focuses on the lived body as the embodied dimension of our human experience, and how it can be enriched through various experiences that enable us to reach our full potential (Whitehead, 2007). It is about viewing the body holistically rather than separate from the entire being. By planning diverse PA in four environments, including land, water, air, and ice, the model also aligns with the sports sector and its philosophy of developing both fundamental movement skills and fundamental sport skills. Moreover, with allocated playing time, intentionally designed structured lesson plans, and one consistent leader in each activity, the model aims to increase the participants' motor proficiency and levels of PA while building their confidence and competence across distinct exercises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walleye (Sander vitreus) populations in Alberta, Canada, collapsed by the mid-1990s and were a case study in the paper Canada's Recreational Fisheries: The Invisible Collapse? Here we fit age-structured population dynamics models to data from a landscape-scale monitoring program to assess walleye population status and reconstruct recruitment dynamics following the invisible collapse. Assessments indicated that populations featured low Fmsy values of approximately 0.2–0.3 under conservative assumptions for the stock–recruitment relationship but that many populations were lightly exploited during 2000–2018. Recruitment reconstructions showed that recovery from collapse in 33/55 lakes was driven in part by large positive recruitment anomalies that occurred during 1998–2002. Additionally, 15/55 lakes demonstrated cyclic recruitment dynamics. The documented recruitment anomalies and cyclic fluctuations could be due to environmental effect(s) or cannibalism, and experimentation is likely necessary to resolve this uncertainty. These findings contribute new information on the recovery dynamics of walleye following the invisible collapse and demonstrate the effectiveness of coupling traditional fisheries science models with broad-scale monitoring data to improve understanding of population dynamics and sustainability across landscapes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Collecting and monitoring the information from patients through patient-reported experience measures (PREMs) about the quality of care they receive is important for tracking changes in healthcare quality, stimulate innovation, and enhance person-centred care. The objective of this theoretical paper is to discuss the use of implementation science theories, models, and frameworks to inform and evaluate the integration of the electronic collection of PREMs (ePREMs) in healthcare quality improvement for primary care in Canada. Methods: To assess potential knowledge-to-practice gaps in implementing ePREMs in primary care in Alberta, the overarching implementation model that will be used is the Knowledge to Action Cycle. An integrated knowledge translation approach will ensure ongoing engagement of key stakeholders (e.g. primary care providers, patients) throughout the study. ePREM implementation will be informed by the identification of barriers and facilitators to implementation using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR). The CFIR brings an organizational perspective providing an opportunity to explore the intervention characteristics, the context of implementation, individual factors, and the processes that influence implementation of ePREMs in healthcare. Identified barriers and facilitators to ePREM implementation will be mapped to evidence-based implementation strategies and prioritized by stakeholders. The RE-AIM framework will be used to guide the evaluation of ePREM implementation outcomes after six months of implementation by assessing Reach, Effectiveness, Adoption, Implementation, and Maintenance (sustainability). Discussion: Consultations with stakeholders affirm the importance of using integrated knowledge translation approaches and the need to better understand how to integrate ePREMs in primary care. Using an implementations science approach, this study can provide guidance for mitigating important ePREM implementation challenges and promote the successful uptake and use of ePREMs for quality improvement in healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]