CHEO centre to focus on best mental health solutions for youths
There are a lot of services and interventions touted to help children and teens with mental health problems. CHEO is opening a research centre to probe what works in the real world and what doesn’t — and why.
There are a lot of questions that need to be answered about whether services are timely, effective and fair. Getting those answers will position the Centre for Mental Health Services and Policy Research to be at the forefront of research in this area, said CHEO’s director of psychiatric and mental health research Dr. Mario Cappelli.
“Ultimately, we want to have global impact.”
The first step in that plan was announced Tuesday when CHEO named the first two research chairs at the centre: Dr. William Gardner, a psychiatrist and statistician who is a professor of epidemiology at the University of Ottawa, and Dr. John McLennan, who will be coming to Ottawa in September from Calgary, where he is a child psychiatrist, researcher and associate professor at the University of Calgary.
CHEO’s new centre will be groundbreaking, said McLennan, who is currently working on a cross-Ontario study that looks at the prevalence of mental illness and another that looks at schoolbased interventions for youth with behavioural problems. There’s a desperate need for real-life assessment of mental health services and interventions as they work in the real world where things can get “kind of messy,” he said.
There’s a lot of data available, but that information is often in separate electronic records systems, Gardner said. A youth with mental health problems might have records in a hospital emergency department, and other records with a private psychiatrist and a school psychologist, for example. But that information isn’t linked.
The military has ways to share information between its branches, but not the health care system, Gardner said.“There is no way for a researcher to see the total picture on this child. There are fundamental disconnections with the systems we use. It’s true everywhere in North America.”
At the same time, records don’t identify such factors as language, race, ethnicity or sexual orientation, so there’s a lack of information on how different communities are being served by the mental health community.
“I don’t think for a minute that mental health care is all about numbers and statistics,” Gardner said. “People want to be treated as people. We only use numbers to see if we’re doing a good job.”
In Cornwall, for example, there’s a tele-health system in the emergency room with a video link to CHEO, allowing patients to get a mental assessment without going to Ottawa. CHEO is also working on a program to help family doctors and nurse practitioners in towns outside Ottawa to strengthen skills in treating mental health by going over real-life cases, similar to the way medical residents discuss their cases with colleagues and supervisors while they’re in training.
It isn’t only about wait times, McLennan said. “We need to keep an eye on the outcomes for the kids.”