This is NOW!
Novel clinic
June 16, 2008
NEWS FEATURE
Novel clinic cuts wait times for kids seeking help
By Derek Sankey
Lisa Kindt and her daughter, Sage, were getting to the end of their rope.
The nine-year-old girl was having trouble reading, a problem that made it difficult for her to keep up with the other students at her Turner Valley school. An intelligent, energetic girl, it would sometimes take Sage three hours to read a single paragraph. “I thought maybe she had ADD (attention deficit disorder),” says Lisa, noting that there were no obvious reasons for the problem. “We were both stressing about it, which caused us both anxiety.”
Sage’s teachers also recognized there was a problem, but they were at a loss to explain why the young girl wasn’t developing at the same pace as her classmates. Private tutorial services yielded no results. The problem became so pronounced that Lisa considered holding her back in school. “I refused to keep pushing her forward and get to a point where she just can’t do it.”
It was becoming clear that Sage would need to see specialists and perhaps undergo a series of tests to determine whether she had a learning disability. Ordinarily, that might take up to two years. Fortunately, the Kindts were able to access a novel new clinic operated out of the University of Calgary that cut the wait time down to two weeks.
The clinic – known as the University of Calgary Applied Psychological and Educational Services, or U-CAPES – offers psychological assessment, prevention and treatment services to children, teens and adults. The U-CAPES team, including specialists in child and school psychology, counselling psychology and special education, works with primary care networks and other professionals to provide a range of services to children and families. Normally, a child like Sage might go months or years visiting various experts in an effort to determine whether she has a particular problem. The U-CAPES clinic reduces wait times, in part because it operates as a team.
The Kindts discovered U-CAPES through Dr. Brian Siray. A family physician based in Millarville, Dr. Siray is a member of the Rural Calgary Primary Care Network, which has a contract with U-CAPES. The network, a partnership involving the Alberta government, the Calgary Health Region and the Alberta Medical Association, offers a relatively new approach to providing care through pooling resources and sharing services. The Calgary Rural Primary Care Network, for example, includes 80 rural physicians in nine communities.
Dr. Siray says the U-CAPES Clinic is a huge benefit to families like the Kindts. “There are kids that are waiting in the system for sometimes two years to get a psycho-educational assessment done,” he says. “In the meantime, they’re missing that opportunity for treatment, which is terrible.”
At the clinic, Sage underwent a battery of the latest and most thorough tests available over a two-day period. The team determined that Sage did not have ADD. Rather, she had not grasped her phonics in Kindergarten and Grade 1, leading to a basic reading comprehension problem that compounded as she moved into higher grades.
“It was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders,” recalls Lisa. “That (the clinic assessment) gave us the specifics. It was amazing for us.” The team of experts helped Lisa develop a plan to help Sage catch up to her classmates by doing regular reading exercises tailored to the child’s developmental delay. Sage is pleased with the results. She explains that when she used to take a test at school, she would have to leave the classroom and get someone to read her the test questions. “I had to go out with a person who read for me, and now I don’t have to do that anymore. It’s really fun when you get to stay with the class and you don’t have to go by yourself,” she says.
U-CAPES is the brainchild of Dr. Vicki Schwean, associate dean of the Division of Applied Psychology at the U of C, who pioneered a similar clinic at the University of Saskatchewan. When she became Associate Dean at U of C, she saw a need for this type of clinic in the community and worked to create one within the university’s graduate program requirements for operation. She then began approaching potential clients within the Region to secure contracts so that it operates on a self-sustaining economic model without the need for external funding.
Dr. Schwean says wait times for services like the ones offered at U-CAPES can be attributed to a variety of factors, including a shortage of specialists. In addition to housing a number of psychologists under one roof, the clinic counters the labour shortage by utilizing the skills and talents of students. “This is a great way for us to provide good training to our students in a multidisciplinary collaboration in the assessment of children,” Dr. Schwean says. “When you come here, you can be sure the students have been trained extremely well and you get a quality service,” she says, noting faculty members have the latest assessment tools available.
Dr. Schwean launched the clinic in 2006 with initial funding from professional development workshops and speakers. Funding from the Calgary Primary Care Network helped U-CAPES expand the scope of services and capacity later that year.
The initiative is sponsored in Black Diamond and High River by Local Primary Care Teams as part of the Calgary Rural Primary Care Network. Joe MacGillivray, Executive Director of the Rural Calgary Primary Care Network, says these partnerships were designed in part to look for innovative ways to deliver health services such as the U-CAPES clinic. “We foster decision-making at the community level, which is leading to many innovative primary care initiatives,” he says. PCNs are enhancing community health services such as U-CAPES, MacGillivray says, adding: “This is one example of 30 initiatives across rural communities.”
The U-CAPES clinic now has about a dozen contracts with various health and education partners, including the Calgary Rural Primary Care Network, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, Persons with Developmental Disabilities and several other organizations. It also accepts private referrals from family physicians, and diagnoses and treats adults as well as children. Dr. Schwean hopes the model will expand to include Calgary school boards and other organizations.
In its first year of operation, the clinic, under the leadership of U-CAPES Director Dr. Joan Jeary, helped about 200 children suffering from a wide range of learning and development difficulties, such as: attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, oppositional defiant disorder and Asperger’s disorder among others.
Meanwhile, Dr. Siray says the clinic continues to benefit his practice. “I was constantly scrambling to find another psychologist and get to know them and how they do their assessments,” he says. “This provides tremendous stability.”
Back in Turner Valley, Lisa and daughter Sage continue to work at developing her reading skills by spending extra time at home focusing on the challenges identified through U-CAPES’ assessments. “She’s still behind, but she’s progressing and getting there,” says Lisa. It will take some time, and Lisa knows that her daughter may need some additional tutorial services, but she’s just glad to know that any private tutors will be much more productive since they’ll be focused on Sage’s unique learning challenges instead of trying to cover the whole spectrum.
“Sage knows that she’s always going to be one of those students that gives the extra 10 per cent,” says Lisa, adding that both her own and Sage’s stress and anxiety have eased dramatically since attending U-CAPES. “Sage is such a positive person and she has a really good outlook toward it.”
Derek Sankey is a Calgary writer.
What is U-CAPES?
Launched in 2006, the University of Calgary applied Psychological and Educational Services, or U-CAPES, offers high-quality psychological assessment, prevention and treatment services to improve the educational and psychological well-being of children, adolescents, adults and families in the Calgary Health Region. You can access the clinic by calling 220-2851, or e-mailing ucapes@ucalgary.ca.