Grant: Operating Grant: SPOR iCT Rewarding Success - Travel Awards - Alberta

Children and youth with mental illness require specialized, multidisciplinary, mental healthcare, especially during times of crisis. This project aims to improve the delivery of acute mental healthcare services in 3 provinces by providing children with the right care, in the right place, at the right time. The ED is a key access point for mental healthcare yet the care provided is expensive and does not meet the needs of children and their families. The ED provides unscheduled, urgent mental healthcare when parents perceive that urgent help is needed, when they are unsure of how to help them, or unable to access care elsewhere. Thus, the ED serves a vital 'safety net' function for many children and youth, providing 'afterhours' access, and filling existing gaps in access to community- and school-based mental healthcare services. This proposal addresses priorities from Alberta's Valuing Mental Health Reports including the need to provide children and youth with timely, respectful, responsive, effective, safe, person/family-centered care. Specific to the SPOR Rewarding Success call, this proposal addresses 3 of the 4 priorities identified for Alberta: Addictions and Mental Health, Health Workforce, and Health Information Management. The proposal will 1) improve the patient, family, and healthcare provider acute care experience in order to reduce morbidity; 2) eliminate low-value healthcare; 3) address healthcare inefficiencies and variations in care; and 4) optimize use of the Alberta Health Services workforce through integrated acute and community mental healthcare services. We will incorporate the use of local administrative and patient data with a goal of improving mental health information management.