The Haliburton Kawartha Northumberland Peterborough health unit (HKNP) is seeking provincial money to advance an “innovative” youth substance use prevention program that it recently launched in Peterborough and plans to expand to Haliburton County.
Dr. Thomas Piggott, HKNP medical officer of health, said the initiative is centred on the Icelandic Prevention Model (IPM), which challenges people who have, work, or interact with kids daily to find different ways of engaging and educating on key issues.
Peterborough Public Health (PPH) began investigating IPM in 2019, before it merged with the Haliburton, Kawartha, Pine Ridge district health unit (HKPR). Work was paused through the pandemic but picked up again in 2023. A launch event was held in Peterborough April 29.
Piggott feels the program is an “absolute need” rather than “nice-to-have,” given concerning trends in youth behaviour in Peterborough in recent years. The city has the highest rate in Ontario for Cannabisrelated emergency department visits and ranks sixth for self-reported underage drinking. Tobacco use among students in grades 7 to 12 is also above the provincial average.
“If we can find new ways to wrap our communities’ arms around children and really support them, we can send kids on a different trajectory than what we’re seeing for a lot of people now,” Piggott said.
The program is being led locally by health unit staffers Lora Keitel and Martha Faulkner, with about a dozen organizations actively coordinating, including the John Howard Society, United Way, the YMCA, the OPP, and Canadian Mental Health Association.
The team is also working with Planet Youth, an Icelandic-based firm that helps with start-up.
Planet Youth advocates for a 10-step approach. The first phase is all planning, focusing on identifying partners, finding funding sources, and pre-data collection. Faulker said staff has been working on that since last fall and will soon by ready to move onto community participation and engagement.
“We know adolescence is a critical stage in healthy development. Youth are more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors, and experiment with substances for a variety of reasons – social inclusion and belonging, poor mental health, challenges coping with life stress, and just wanting to enjoy something,” Keitel said, noting most of the supports currently in place for struggling youth is reactive, rather than preventative.
“We’re never going to treat our way out of the mental health and substance use crisis we’re in. We need to realign our focus and work to incorporate harm reduction for us to make impactful change in our communities,” she added.
The health unit has identified two secondary schools it will work with initially – Holy Cross and Kenner in Peterborough. Keitel said it’s important youth learn to adopt healthy behaviours in the four areas they spend most of their time – at school, socializing with friends, at home with family, and leisure time.
Faulkner noted there’s no one-size-fits-all approach, with staff to tailor its efforts to individual people and larger situations on a case-by-case basis.
She attended a Planet Youth conference in Iceland in March, where she spoke to people from communities in the U.S., Spain, Romania and South Africa who have adopted IPM.
“All of them have seen a decrease in substance use harms and an increase in overall wellbeing,” Faulkner said.
Faulkner said there will be regular check-ins with parents and youth, as well as community surveys to help form the program’s future direction. She told the HKNP board during a recent meeting there is an intent to expand the program to Kawartha Lakes and Haliburton and Northumberland counties.
Piggott warned it’s not the kind of program to deliver immediate results.
“This work will take years to decades to see the real benefits of, because the challenges we’re seeing today have been decades in the making,” he said.
