Project 465815

The global pandemic has made it clear that there is an urgent need for high-quality mental health services for children and youth. However, the voices of children, youth, and their families are largely absent from evaluations of mental health services. Right now, quality is measured in terms of the number of visits to clinics, emergency departments, hospitalizations, and the costs associated with those services. Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are a tool for measuring the quality of mental health services from the patient's perspective. PROMs are questionnaires for patients that ask about the health and well-being outcomes they experience from a treatment or service. In Calgary, the new Centre for Child and Youth Mental Health is opening. This presents an opportunity to incorporate PROMs into clinical operations at the centre. PROMs will bring the patient's perspective into quality assessments at the centre but selecting PROMs from the hundreds of available measures is a challenge. Every PROM is designed to capture a particular health outcome. To choose PROMs, we must understand which outcomes are most important to patients and caregivers seeking care at the centre. That's why we will be engaging with children, youth, and their families to understand what matters most to them when they access mental health services. We will use this information to choose a set of PROMs that focus on the outcomes that are important to patients.