Leading the Way
Introduction
In Canada, there is no overarching system to recognize and treat infant and early mental health challenges experienced by children, prenatal to age 6. Many communities struggle to recognize young children who may be at risk for mental health challenges and, consequently, access to appropriate support is either non-existent or very limited in scope. As a result, too many children at risk of poor mental health outcomes go undetected and unsupported for years. Given that the developing brain is most malleable in the first 6 years of life, missing this optimal window of opportunity to introduce support means that, ultimately, more efforts and resources are required to improve the child’s long-term outcomes.
To address this, we propose to determine how the Pathways of Care in Infant and Early Mental Health intervention (learn more about Pathways) can improve communities’ capacity to support infant and early mental health.
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Approach
With financial support from the Mental Health in the Early Years Implementation Science grant from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR), we propose to:
- Support, optimize, and systematize community-level implementation of Infant and Early Mental Health Care Pathways by bringing the intervention to several Ontario communities in various contexts (rural/urban, multicultural/Indigenous, etc.) and monitoring implementation success.
- Assess the impact of the IEMH Care Pathways intervention on children, families, practitioners, systems, and communities, by measuring outcome indicators of families' wellbeing, practitioners' competence, confidence, and capacity, as well as system change and community strength as Pathways are identified and improved.
Our goal is to validate the IEMH Care Pathways approach as an intervention in which more Canadian communities can engage to ensure that children at risk of poor mental health outcomes are equitably identified, addressed, and supported as early and effectively as possible.
Project Team
This project is led by a collaboration between IEMHP and:
- Dr. James Reynolds’ team at Queen’s University in Kingston, ON
- Dr. Sheri Madigan’s team at University of Calgary
- Dr. Jennifer Zwicker’s team at University of Calgary
- The Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addictions at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario
Learn More
Would you like to learn more and get involved in this project? Contact us today.
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