Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grant - Institute Community Support

Early psychosis intervention (EPI) is a comprehensive and life-saving treatment for youth with psychosis. Ontario is considered a leader in the development and delivery of EPI services, with the Ministry of Health's Early Psychosis Intervention Program Standards guiding service delivery through a network of over 50 programs supported by the Early Psychosis Intervention Ontario Network (EPION). Despite being guided by the same set of Program Standards, establishing consistency across programs in processes, frequency, and tools for evaluation remains a challenge, with little focus on systematically evaluating the patient, family, and clinician experience. EPI evaluation could benefit from widening its scope to include other elements of quality, access, and experience, and engaging patients and families with lived experience in selecting metrics and contributing to processes. This planning grant will support a synthesis of evaluation practices and experience outcomes that will guide a 1-day planning meeting with EPI stakeholders, including patients, family members, frontline clinicians, and administrators. Our objectives are: 1) to conduct a scoping review of the community mental health service literature on evaluation processes and patient, family, and clinician experience outcomes, 2) to involve a range of stakeholders in establishing evaluation priorities to systematically capture experience outcomes, 3) to discuss approaches for engaging patients and families with lived experience in EPI evaluation, 4) to facilitate collaboration of provincial experts in EPI evaluation with program administrators, frontline clinicians, and patients and family members with lived experience in EPI, and 5) to inform the development of a CIHR grant application to pilot test evaluation processes and experience metrics in Ontario EPI programs. Findings can be used to systematically integrate and monitor evaluation outcomes in preparation for a formal learning health system.