Grant: Planning Grants - Priority Announcement: Health Services and Policy Research

In 2005 the Ontario Ministry of Health mandated the use of the Resident Assessment Instrument Mental Health (RAI-MH) for all persons admitted to adult, inpatient mental health beds/units in Ontario. The RAI-MH is designed to support person-centered care planning, outcome measurement, quality improvement and case mix based funding applications. While extensive work has been done to examine the reliability and validity of the RAI-MH, there remains a need to examine how this instrument is being used in clinical settings to inform care and discharge planning. However, there remains a gap between the collection of health information at the point of care and the use of this information for understanding service needs and streamlining service planning. This proposal aims to work with persons with mental illness to develop a summary of routinely collected clinical health information that could help to empower them to better, and more meaningfully, participate in decision-making about their services. To achieve this, a series of one-day workshops with stakeholders across the province (i.e., northern, southwestern, central, and eastern regions) will be held. The stakeholders will include persons currently receiving inpatient mental health services and representatives from various patient advocacy groups. Stakeholders will be engaged in a discussion about the practical informational needs of patients to identify opportunities where information from the RAI-MH could meet these needs. Based on this discussion, a meaningful and user-friendly way to summarize the information from the RAI-MH for persons with mental illness will be developed. This work will have implications for persons with mental illness receiving services, clinicians providing services, and the organizations by producing a common mechanism to summarize and share health information.