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Learning

SPARK Learning

Learning That Moves Evidence Into Action

SPARK Learning sessions are designed to feature leading voices from across the child health and healthcare ecosystems, share and explore evidence and innovations, identify implications for system improvement and transformation, and thereby inform and improve children’s healthcare systems and outcomes of care.

Each session is designed to move beyond awareness toward actionable insights and systems change.

Flexible formats

SPARK Learning offers online sessions that are:

  • On-demand sessions: Listen and learn at your own pace, on your own schedule
  • Live and interactive presentations: Participate in real-time discussions, Q&A, and knowledge and resources exchange

By connecting people, perspectives, and evidence, SPARK Learning helps ensure knowledge is not only shared but applied in ways that improve children's healthcare systems and outcomes and experiences for children, youth, and families.

Who should participate?

SPARK Learning is designed for:

  • Health system leaders and decision-makers
  • Clinicians and care providers
  • Researchers and knowledge users
  • Policymakers and advisors
  • Family and lived experience partners
  • Anyone working to improve child and youth health systems

Contact the SPARK team

Thank you very much! SPARK always has the best webinars. I'm always attending when I can. Thank you for hosting and to Dr. Maisha Syeda for the excellent, much needed, learning opportunity. 

- SPARK Learning participant

We would like to thank Children’s Healthcare Canada for hosting a successful SPARK webinar. We are very grateful that you provided us with an opportunity to showcase our recent policy paper, Stemming the tide: Investing early in the mental health of Ontario’s 7-to 12-year-olds

-  The Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions

Upcoming SPARK Learning opportunities

Watch on the Member Portal

Neighbourhood Income Across the Reproductive Period — And What It Means for Health Systems Planning for Maternal and Child Health

With Dr. Jennifer Jairam

In this new SPARK Learning session, Dr. Jennifer Jairam, Perinatal Epidemiologist and Postdoctoral Fellow at Unity Health Toronto and ICES, challenges how we think about neighbourhood income and its role in shaping pregnancy outcomes and newborn health. Her research reveals that a family's economic environment is dynamic, and that tracking how it shifts across a woman's reproductive years tells a far richer story than any single data point can.

Drawing on large, population-based studies from Ontario, Dr. Jairam introduces new approaches to understanding neighbourhood income trajectories and their links to adverse maternal and infant birth outcomes. By examining income mobility between births, her work opens a critical window: identifying when and where prevention and intervention strategies can do the most good in reducing health inequities.

The implications for health systems are significant. Connecting earlier risk identification to upstream social determinants of health, this research offers a foundation for more equitable policy development for children, youth, and families across Canada.

Dr. Jennifer Jairam is a Perinatal Epidemiologist and Postdoctoral Fellow at Unity Health Toronto and ICES. She holds a PhD in Epidemiology from the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, where her doctoral thesis examined upstream social determinants of health through a life-course lens, with a focus on maternal and neonatal outcomes in low-income communities in Ontario. Her current postdoctoral research uses health and social administrative data from across Ontario to study neighbourhood income patterns between births in relation to maternal and newborn health.

Recent SPARK Learning sessions