Grant: Meetings Planning & Dissemination Grant: Reproductive and Child Health

Eating disorders (ED) are chronic and life threatening illnesses. Despite the significant morbidity and mortality associated with these conditions, they remain understudied and underserved. In order to optimize the power and generalizability and to address the shortcomings of outcomes research for EDs in children and youth, specialized treatment teams need to work together with joint interdisciplinary research agendas. The interdisciplinary, multi-institutional Ontario partnership of the Centralized Multisite Database Partnership (CMDP) is proposing a national meeting for specialized pediatric ED teams in tertiary care hospitals across Canada, with the goals of communicating, collaborating, and ultimately creating shared goals for outcomes research in pediatric EDs. The proposed CIHR funded meeting will directly address child and youth mental health, with a focus on outcomes research on the treatment of EDs in children and youth. The meeting will be a satellite meeting to the Eating Disorder Association of Canada conference. Our meeting will provide a national opportunity for ten institutions with specialized pediatric ED teams to work together to develop a health services research agenda focussed on critical issues in outcomes research for pediatric EDs. Our objectives build on the partnership accomplishments of Ontario's CMDP and the collective outcomes research accomplishments of the tertiary care interdisciplinary ED teams across Canada. Anticipated outcomes of the meeting will be: (1) knowledge exchange and dissemination on current outcomes research practices for pediatric EDs across Canada; (2) strengthened and new interdisciplinary and multi-institutional relationships; (3) ideas and solutions for fostering capacity building in outcomes research; (4) consensus on three national outcomes research goals for pediatric EDs in Canada; and (5) consensus, joint ownership, and leadership on objectives to realize the newly created national research goals.