Grant: New Investigator Award - Priority Announcement: Clinical Research

Currently, in times of acute crisis, immediate mental health care options for families with children with mental illness are limited. While hospital emergency departments (EDs) are recognized as a critical health care access point, most children are discharged from the ED without access to appropriate, urgent follow-up care. A failure to provide urgent care can result in: increased emergency service demands through repeat visits for same events, increased stress for families, and increased economic costs through use of expensive emergency services. These outcomes suggest a need for follow-up support for families that includes support for parents who care for their child after an acute crisis. Through national collaborations with researchers, health care providers and administrators, and Canadian families, we propose to develop and evaluate a potentially groundbreaking telehealth intervention that can provide Canadian parents of vulnerable children timely access to evidence-based care and critical support while they are waiting for services. This intervention, Family Pathways, will bridge emergency and community-based services addressing the current urgent care gap. We will conduct a multi-phase study. Phase 1 will focus on intervention adaptation, refinement and pre-testing using the Delphi process with a nationally representative group of clinical experts, and qualitative interviews with intervention stakeholders (parents, clinicians, and administrators). In Phase 2, Family Pathways will be compared to a wait-list, control group in a multi-site demonstration trial (randomized controlled trial; RCT) to assess intervention acceptability and feasibility, and to establish processes for a full-scale, nation-wide RCT. This study will result in a robust, clinical intervention that can provide parents with timely access to evidence-based care and, if effective, will be a critical support while families are waiting for services after a mental health crisis.