In Through the Out Door: Do Increasing Pediatric Emergency Mental Health Presentations Reflect Poorer Access to Primary and Outpatient Mental Health Care?

Nearly one in five Canadian children and youth experience mental illness. Unfortunately, many do not receive the care they require to treat their mental illness, perhaps because they can't get timely care from a family doctor or from community mental health services. Lack of proper treatment can have long-lasting harmful effects on their mental and physical health, education, and employment. It can also leave children and young people at risk of mental health crises. Recent reports show that many Canadian children and young people are increasingly turning to hospital Emergency Departments for help with mental illnesses. However, Emergency Departments are designed for very quick assessments and care of trauma or other emergencies and are not well-suited for the kind of wide-ranging, ongoing care necessary for the proper assessment and treatment of mental illnesses. In this study, we will measure how many children and youth in Nova Scotia are going to Emergency Departments for mental health reasons. We will study whether these visits are related to not having a regular family doctor, or are the result of long wait times to be seen in outpatient mental health clinics. This will help us to identify opportunities to support family doctors and mental health services to reduce the need for use of Emergency Departments for mental health care. We will compare the use of Emergency Departments in different communities to help us identify areas in which we should focus our attention, both to see what is not working in mental health care, and what is working well. Finally, this project will help us to develop the right research questions for larger studies about mental health care and Emergency Department use.