Grant: Cat Gr:Standards for Children/Youth Mental Health Serv. - child welfare settings

Childhood and youth are periods of promise and are also when mental health and substance use problems often emerge. Families often face long wait-times; complicated pathways; and poor-quality, unfriendly services when trying to access care. This is particularly challenging for those in the child welfare system, who face major system obstacles such as a lack of continuity across multiple service delivery systems. Coupled with this unresponsive system are the intersecting oppressions faced by many youth in care, including racism, stigmatization, and language barriers. To improve the mental health care offered to those in the child welfare system, we need to understand how youth, families, service providers, decision makers do their daily work and how they currently integrate knowledge, training, and recent practice recommendations. We also need to understand what helps and what hinders the use of current guidelines and the roles each service takes in integrating and coordinating care. To do this, this project will use many methods (interviews, focus groups, reviewing documents, etc.) involving all key groups (youth, families, staff, managers, policymakers). We will learn from individuals in the youth mental health and child welfare systems - what they do, what they should do, how to improve and progress toward these goals, what trainings are needed. Our team includes decision makers from francophone and anglophone Child welfare services in Montréal, Québec, as well as a decision-maker from the Ministry of Health and Social Services, researchers, and clinicians. We will continue to partner with them and share our findings widely and creatively to make sure that our research makes sense and actually changes services and policy. Our team will pay attention to equity so that all Quebecers in the child welfare system can receive the mental health support they need. Our findings will also guide norms and standards for child and youth mental health in the rest of Canada.