Grant: Catalyst Grant: Standards for Children and Youth Mental Health Services

Many youth experience difficulties accessing mental health services. In the last decade, there has been a growing movement to include youth peer support workers (individuals with lived experience) to make mental health services more accessible by providing instrumental and emotional support to youth with mental health and substance use (MHSU) concerns. The Mental Health Commission of Canada has created peer support guidelines and Peer Support Canada built a training and certification process based on these guidelines. Since the original guidelines and training curriculum were developed for adults, there is an urgent need to develop new peer support guidelines that recognize the unique needs of youth. We will identify how to implement these guidelines and training curriculum in our national network of Integrated Youth Services (IYS). IYS is a service delivery model that provides a 'one-stop shop' for young people to access services including housing, employment and mental healthcare. This project will co-design youth peer support guidelines, training curriculum and evaluation strategies in IYS. We will bring together key stakeholders (youth, peer support workers, decision makers, healthcare providers, representatives from peer support organizations, and content experts in IYS) to review and prioritize how to change the guidelines and training curriculum for peer support. Next, stakeholders will identify an evaluation framework for service user, program, and system level processes and outcomes in YPS. Finally, stakeholders will collaboratively identify strategies for implementing the practice guidelines, training curriculum, and evaluation framework for YPS in Canada. The outcome of this project will ensure all youth with MHSU concerns can access YPS and that we can continue to learn how to improve the training curriculum to ensure it is being provided in a way that is equitable, accessible and safe for youth from different backgrounds and locations in Canada.