Bocking- promotion of healthy development

I think that where practitioners play a key role in helping to promote healthy development of children both prenatally and early in childhood is being able to give a clear message around what’s important and, and certainly education is critical. Being able to identify what we call the warning signs. So an example of that would be you know in Sub-Saharan Africa, health care providers play a key role in terms of helping women and families to identify, literally, the warning signs, so during pregnancy; so things like headache which could be a sign of severe preeclampsia or toxemia, vaginal bleeding, excessive pain; these are things that unless one is educated and understands the importance of those, they might not trigger or, you know, identify a situation for women that this is serious and they need to seek that care. So that would be an example in a in a developing country. In Canada, I think that the principles are the same, really around education, helping women to understand what’s important and what they should be watching out for.  And that can be as basic as providing information about Canada’s Food Guide, or you know, the importance of avoiding drinking alcohol or drugs exposures during pregnancy. So education, I think, is a key part of that. And being able to answer questions; why that might be important is key. There’s a huge amount of information, in our world now on the internet. And being a reliable source, or being able to comment on the reliability of these materials I think is really important for practitioners.