Compass program

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 61, No. 3, April 2019, Pages 132-133 News

Compass is a province-wide service to support evidence-based care for all BC children and youth living with mental health and substance use concerns. Community care providers such as primary care providers, specialist physicians, child and youth mental health team clinicians, Foundry clinicians, and concurrent disorders/substance use clinicians have access to information, advice, and resources they need in order to deliver appropriate and timely care to children and youth close to home.

When you call for a consultation, you will have access to a multidisciplinary team who can offer:

  • Telephone advice and support.
  • Identification and help with connection to local and online resources.
  • Telehealth consultation to you and your patient, when needed.
  • Tailored training and education.

The multidisciplinary team includes child and youth psychiatrists, mental health and substance use clinicians (social workers, nurses, psychologists, etc.) and a care coordinator.

The Compass team can help with diagnostic clarification, medication recommendations, treatment planning, consultation on cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, substance counseling, behavioral issues, family issues, trauma treatment, and general support when things aren’t going well. You will receive a written record of all consultation recommendations for your patient’s chart.

Compass aims to have a member of our multidisciplinary team answer most phone calls and respond to your questions in real time. For more specialized questions, we aim to get back to you within the same or next day. Telehealth consultations are organized on an as-needed basis following the initial phone consultation.

What you need to know to use the service:

  • Compass is a consultative service and community providers retain full clinical responsibility of their patients. Recommendations provided by Compass should not supersede the best clinical judgment of an in-person care provider.
  • If patients and family consent, Compass will collect identifying patient information to facilitate any needed follow-up with you (or with the families directly). If patients or families don’t want their information stored, Compass can provide recommendations on an anonymous basis.
  • Compass is not a crisis intervention service, but will support providers with advice on safety planning, risk assessments, etc. Please contact your local crisis services for any emergencies.
  • Compass will collect and store your demographic and practice-related information.
  • Compass will periodically reach out to providers to better understand their experience with the service and communicate any upcoming workshops or educational opportunities.

For more information, call 1 855 702-7272, Monday to Friday, 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Register at www.bcchildrens.ca/compass.

. Compass program. BCMJ, Vol. 61, No. 3, April, 2019, Page(s) 132-133 - News.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

An alternate version of ICMJE style is to additionally list the month an issue number, but since most journals use continuous pagination, the shorter form provides sufficient information to locate the reference. The NLM now lists all authors.

BCMJ standard citation style is a slight modification of the ICMJE/NLM style, as follows:

  • Only the first three authors are listed, followed by "et al."
  • There is no period after the journal name.
  • Page numbers are not abbreviated.


For more information on the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals, visit www.icmje.org

BCMJ Guidelines for Authors

Leave a Reply