ACCESS Open Minds has been a landmark iniative in youth mental health care across Canada. Launched in 2014 as the first Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (SPOR) initiative, this groundbreaking project was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and the Graham Boeckh Foundation. The project was led by Douglas researchers Dr. Ashok Malla and Dr. Srividya N. Iyer, alongside a dedicated team including Douglas researchers Dr. Jai Shah, Dr. Patricia Boksa, and Dr. Ridha Joober, other McGill researchers such as, Drs. Rebecca Fuhrer, Neil Anderson, Cécile Rousseau, and Shirin Golchi, U de Montréal researchers Drs. Shalini Lal and Amal Abdel-Baki, as well as youth, families, community members, and policy-makers. ACCESS Open Minds’ 16 sites served youth in urban, rural, and remote communities, including in 6 Indigenous communities; Anglophone and Francophone youth; and groups with particular vulnerabilities (immigrants, refugees, ethnic minorities, state-protected youth, homeless youth, and first-year university students).
This week, findings from this pan-Canadian project were published in JAMA Psychiatry, revealing that after ACCESS-OM’s implementation in diverse communities, more young people sought help, and the timeliness of service delivery significantly improved, with most youth being offered an appointment within 3 days of their first contact with services. These results underscore the project’s impact at a time when ensuring timely access to quality youth mental health care is more critical than ever. Given this context, these findings are likely to have a major impact on the way youth mental health services are delivered in Canada, and elsewhere.
Link to the paper I Jama Psychiatry
Read the article I Access Open minds website
Listen to Dr. Srividya Iyer discuss these findings on a JAMA podcast episode :
Pour plus d’informations, veuillez consulter accessopenminds.ca ou contacter srividya.iyer@mcgill.ca