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Event Overview

Speaker & Participant Remarks

Dr. Donna Murnaghan- Monday, April 12th, 2010

After Krista has spoken about living and understanding cancer from the perspective of a survivor and her family experience I would like to bring something different to the dialogue. I want you to think about the children, your children, your grandchildren. I want you to think about what is the legacy that we are providing in terms of cancer prevention, cancer diagnosis, survivorship for these children. How are we role models for them for lifestyle changes, healthy eating, mental fitness? How are we working to help advance cancer prevention for Canada, not just for Atlantic Canada, but for all of us? Preventing cancer is really upstream thinking, it's not just one child at a time, it's working with the whole community to raise a child.

In cancer prevention that's really where Louise was coming from. Unless we provide strong healthy communities and healthy environments for our children our legacy will be one of illness, poor health, economic disparity and long term chronic disease. So it will take a whole community to raise a child, to protect a child, to give the child the very rights of life, of happiness, of good health and a safe healthy environment?

How do we as a community advance that focus? Consider youth of today? They're living in an information highway now. The technology that they have allows them to sit at their desks or in their room where there is often constant communication from there!! They don't go and talk to one another - they text them, they watch TV and when they're not watching TV they're playing video games, or playing on their computers and all the while they're sitting on their butts. This cultural change in activity of youth is causing early development of chronic diseases and resulting in a serious drain on our health system for the future.

So what are we doing to partner as a community to make a difference in cancer prevention for youth? We have a school health research initiative in Atlantic Canada. What we believe is we all want healthy, active, happy children. But, the statistics are deplorable in Atlantic Canada; in fact they're deplorable in this country of wealth!! We are not really challenging ourselves to look at what we're really doing. So when we look at children we need to look at life styles such as healthy eating, smoking and the role modelling they're still seeing. We look at things such as a new area that Atlantic Canada is looking at, is the mental fitness of children. There is a strong link that when children feel good about themselves, when they have a sense of autonomy, when they feel connected to their peers family and community, when they have a sense of their competency, their strengths, their gifts that they bring they are more likely to adopt other healthy behaviours such as physical activity, healthy eating and not smoking, they are less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviours. But what are we doing to help ensure that all our children and youth in school are able to adopt these positive attributes?

We are working as a part of a National Coalition linking action and science for prevention--Youth Excel. What we're doing is building strong partnerships to work together to identify what works under what circumstances to help enhance youth health. A first step in that process is truly identifying and challenging ourselves about what is a partnership? Is it signing on the line that yes, I'll go along with you; Or is it really engaging with one another to identify mutual goals, is it identifying and building trusting relationships so that if you say you'll partner with me I can trust that you will work with me, and we'll be following the same principles. And within that partnership if we truly value youth we will truly look at how we can help them become the healthiest they can be. A critical step in that process is valuing the contribution of youth to that discussion, planning and action. We are constantly establishing programs for action that are based on adult thinking, based on adult models and our children are telling us they're old school, they don't care about it and we're not being relevant to them.

Therefore my challenge for the dialogues tonight is to think about youth as the very population that we need to address today in a preventive way. We need to truly act as partners, we need to utilize the valuable data that we have in the Region, we need to ask youth what aspects of this data makes sense to them, and identify how we can work with the various communities to implement action for change. This will include government, research, parent communities and most important, youth communities, to make that action positive.