Grant: National Standards for Integrated Youth Services

Mental health and substance use problems often emerge during adolescence and young adulthood and can have negative short- and long-term health, education, social and economic impacts. Despite this, youth face several challenges accessing high quality mental health services leading to delays in treatment and poorer long-term outcomes. Integrated youth services (IYS) have been developed to overcome these barriers by providing a 'one-stop shop' of mental and physical health, substance use, education, employment, peer support and navigation services. Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario (YWHO) provides IYS with the aim of improving youth access, services and outcomes. Two IYS components are integrated service delivery (ISD, or seamless services) and measurement-based care (MBC, or use of consistent monitoring to inform decision-making). Despite the benefits of ISD and MBC, a number of implementation barriers have been identified, including limited evidence on how to define, develop, implement and evaluate youth service standards that are equity and engagement centred. The current study will use implementation science, Indigenous methodologies, Black-centred and antiracism approaches, and quantitative and qualitative methods to address the following objectives: (i) generate new evidence about the implementation and uptake of ISD and MBC standards across YWHO sites; (ii) share knowledge on ISD and MBC to help develop pan-Canadian IYS standards; (iii) continue to work with diverse youth and others to understand and articulate equity and engagement-centred standards development processes. This initiative will use the McCain Model of Youth Engagement to integrate the voices of youth (12-25 years) and families with lived experience and a range of identities and intersectional experiences as well as culture-centred approaches, community engagement, systems thinking and integrated knowledge translation.