Grant: Patient-Oriented Research Collaboration Grants

Most Canadians who receive mental health care do so in primary care settings. Collaborative Care, in which mental health specialists support primary care providers, is well-known to be effective in improving access to appropriate mental health care, illness and functional outcomes, and health care costs. However, Collaborative Care has been poorly operationalized in primary care settings across Canada. Our research has been developing measures to evaluate and improve the implementation and outcomes of Collaborative Care. The perspectives and experiences of clients who have received mental health services have been crucial to this work, particularly because their perspectives have not previously been reflected in the literature on evaluating Collaborative Care. At the same time, our experience suggests that primary care teams may perceive they aren't ready to use evaluation measures informed by clients' perspectives. This project will partner with clients in exploring how they think Collaborative Care should be measured and evaluated. If this research is funded, we will be able to pay clients to become co-researchers working with the scientists on our team, and we will train all team members to work together. We will engage up to 50 clients in working groups to rate outcome and experience measures that are meaningful and acceptable to them from their perspectives as users of mental health service. We will explore primary care providers' perceived readiness to engage clients in their own care and in health care quality improvement initiatives. Finally, we'll meet with clients, health care providers, policymakers, and researchers together to dialogue about how to prepare primary care teams to use client-prioritized measures in Collaborative Care delivery and research. We'll disseminate the research jointly with our client co-researchers. This research will better orient efforts to spread effective Collaborative Care towards outcomes that matter to clients.