Grant: Project Grant - Priority Announcement: Patient-Oriented Research

Engaging people with lived experience (PWLE) of mental health and/or substance use challenges in the co-production of services and research helps the work become more inclusive and relevant. However, there is a lack of research on the impacts of engagement, in part because there are no standardized surveys to evaluate impact. Together with PWLE, we co-produced a research agenda and the current research proposal to advance research on engagement in co-production. Objective. This study aims to develop and test a new measure of the impacts of being engaged in the co-production of mental health/substance use services, programming, or research. Method. All project components have been and will continue to be co-designed by a team including people with lived experience. First, the team will develop draft questions for the scale. They will then conduct a study to test the scale. Three hundred participants with experience in engagement/co-design of mental health and/or substance use services, programming or research across Canada will be invited to complete the scale and some comparison measures. We will conduct a series of analyses to ensure that the scale measures relevant aspects of the impacts of engagement and co-design. We will also conduct exploratory analyses on key demographic groups (e.g., gender) to determine any differences. Conclusions. As lived experience co-production becomes increasingly common, this study will develop a user-friendly measure of the impacts of co-production. This will make it possible for research teams to better evaluate the impacts of co-production in future research. As a patient-oriented research study as defined by CIHR, this study is clearly aligned with the priorities of people with lived experience and will thereby generate outputs that are meaningful to people accessing mental healthcare services across Canada.