Pathways for youth from emergency departments to community services

In Canada, a quarter of young people will experience a mental health or substance use disorder. Many of them will present to an emergency department as the first point of contact with health services for these concerns. However, emergency departments usually do not have pathways in place to help young people connect with services in their community to get the help they need for mental health and substance use issues. For this project, we will develop a standard that emergency departments can use to direct young people with mental health and substance use concerns to needed youth-centred health services. We will use a combination of methods during two stages of work. In the first stage, we will use guidance from the Health Standards Organization to draft the standard with the help of a technical committee and a consensus-building exercise called Delphi. In the second stage, we will dialogue with young people, emergency department physicians and staff, community health service providers, and decision makers to refine and finalize the draft standards. Our team will meet with networks across Canada to translate findings into practice and produce several knowledge products to inform and improve uptake of the standards. This work will improve early intervention in Canada for mental health and substance use concerns and lead to improved short- and long-term outcomes for young people and their communities.