Grant: Operating Grant: Patient-Oriented Research Impact Assessment Grants

Some 75% of all adult mental health disorders arise before age 16, making adolescence an optimal time to intervene. Understanding youth and caregiver perspectives is essential in designing and improving services. When services fit with the preferences of youth and caregivers, they are more likely to use services and benefit from them. There are therefore calls to engage youth and caregivers in service development. At the McCain Centre, we engage youth and caregivers in grants, publications, service design, and research. For example, in the YouthCan IMPACT project, which developed community-based collaborative services for youth, youth and caregivers have been engaged in all phases. In our Youth Addictions and Concurrent Disorder Service, youth with lived experience were engaged in the orientation session as full team members, helping orient youth to the service. In this project, we will analyze qualitative interviews and questionnaire data to understand the impact of engagement on both programs of service. We will also review our various project documents, such as protocols and meeting minutes, to further understand the changes that youth and caregivers have made to clinical services. While we know that the youth and caregiver impact on these projects has been strong, the concrete changes they have made to the two service pathways and the impacts on outcomes have not been examined. Consistent with the patient-oriented research call, this project uses existing data that can be analyzed to better understand the impact that youth and caregiver engagement has on mental health and substance use service design and outcomes. This study will support the CIHR Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research by providing concrete evidence of the value that youth and caregivers bring to mental health service development initiatives, while opening the door to a wide range of future activities to further engage youth and caregivers and to demonstrate the benefits of engagement.