Grant: Meetings, Planning and Dissemination Grant: INMHA

Pine River Institute, SickKids Hospital's Community Health Systems Resource Group, and York University's LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution will bring together a core team of practitioners, researchers and policy makers in the field of adolescent addiction and mental health. The invited participants will attend a two-day multidisciplinary workshop on adolescent addiction treatment and outcome research. Participants will conceptualize goals of treatment and indicators of treatment impact. The workshop will be grounded in a comprehensive review of the current literature, and will share knowledge on conceptual frameworks, current success indicators and follow up measures, data collection protocol, and knowledge mobilization practices. During the two-day session, working groups will collaborate to develop an integrated plan that commits to an implementation of outcome evaluation research, including agreement on indicators of impact, collection protocols, and multidisciplinary strategies for sharing knowledge. Subsequent to the workshop, quarterly progress meetings will be conducted with group representatives for a one year period with a final session to establish ongoing collegial support, collaboration and knowledge mobilization. The long-term outcome of this plan will be the development of accepted standards of practice and outcome measurement but more importantly, the development of on-going research and practice collaborations that will improve youth outcomes in the field over the coming decade.