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Article History

Received: 5 May 2025

Accepted: 17 September 2025

First Online: 3 December 2025

Declarations

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: The activities cited in this paper involved preliminary outreach and participatory engagement with healthcare and community professionals through group-based deliberative dialogues and informal polling. These activities did not involve the collection of identifiable information, the assignment of participant codes, nor the conduct of individual interviews, and therefore no informed consent to participate was obtained. Further, the purpose of these activities was formative in nature, undertaken to inform future research design and implementation strategies, rather than furnish data for knowledge production. Under Article 2.5 of the Canadian Tri-Council Policy Statement: Ethical Conduct for Research Involving Humans (TCPS 2), activities such as program development, quality improvement initiatives, or informal consultations do not constitute research as defined by the Policy, and are excluded from the requirement for Research Ethics Board (REB) review. Therefore, although project activities were conducted in the spirit of the Helsinki Agreement, they did not meet the definition of research involving human participants. As such, the project was considered exempt from REB review under TCPS 2. This interpretation was verified by McGill University’s Chief Ethics Officer.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare no competing interests.