Grant: Catalyst Grant: SPOR Innovative Clinical Trials (iCT)

Eating Disorders (EDs) are serious and potentially life-threatening conditions that typically have their onset in adolescence. Although EDs are known to co-occur with other psychiatric symptoms, their treatment is often excluded from routine mental health and addictions services. At present, there is a total lack of community treatment services for young people with EDs in Ontario and across Canada, leading to youth not getting the treatment they need or having to wait until the symptoms of their ED gets so severe that they require hospital level services. By ignoring this gap in treatment that currently exists, young people with EDs will continue to rely on the most expensive, difficult to access intensive ED treatments; miss opportunities for less intensive and lower-cost services; and continue to struggle with a system of care that does not meet their needs. Policy-makers, in response to an outcry for help by youth and families alike, are searching for best practices to help prevent and intervene early-on in the treatment of EDs. Borrowing from the model of recently added integrated youth wellness hubs in Ontario that have popped up in the last couple of years to address mental health and addictions concerns in youth 12-25 years, might provide a possible solution. The purpose of this strategic planning project is to work through 5 steps, alongside numerous stakeholders and collaborators (youth with lived experience, carers, clinicians, and policy makers), to co-create potential models for youth wellness ED hubs. The current project will set the stage to compare, in a later study, whether an ED-only wellness hub model or a model that embeds EDs into existing youth wellness hubs would be best. Ultimately, findings will enhance understanding as to what model of ED hubs would lend to better outcomes for youth with EDs, and provide a potential platform for a fuller scale up across Canada.