BY ADAM BOWIE BOWIE.ADAM@DAILYGLEANER.COM 29 JUL 2013 09:04AM

A group of researchers working at universities across Atlantic Canada will spend the next few years studying how children, young people and their families access mental health services.

The goal is to assess the services that exist in the four Atlantic provinces so a series of recommendations can be developed to improve health, educational and social outcomes for these young people and their families.

The study is one of 12 Canadian projects to receive about $2.4 million in funding from the federal government, which will provide the cash through the Canadian Institutes of Health Research’s Community-Based Primary Health Care campaign.

Exploring mental health services: Scott Ronis, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the University of New Brunswick, is part of a team of researchers from across the Atlantic provinces who will use $2.4 million in funding from the federal and provincial governments to identify important gaps in the system for children and young people who are struggling with mental illnesses. Stephen MacGillivray/The Daily Gleaner

Scott Ronis, an associate professor in the department of psychology at University of New Brunswick, is one of the researchers involved with this project, alongside colleagues from University of Prince Edward Island, Saint Mary’s University and Memorial University.

He said taking some time to review the work that’s been done, to conduct new interviews with key contacts throughout the region, and to conduct a thorough analysis of this information should help to identify important gaps in the system for people in this province and the rest of Atlantic Canada when it comes to accessing mental health services.

“The federal government puts out calls for research studies, basically, to look at whether or not things are working. We can pour money into services and things like that, but we need to know if they’re actually working,” he said.

“We’re not going to be pointing fingers and sort of identifying what doesn’t work. We’ll be looking to see if there are more efficient ways of accessing services, better ways across the four provinces — specifically in smaller regions.”

He said the study will hone in on five specific conditions.

“We’ll look at depression, anxiety, eating disorders, conduct problems and autism spectrum disorders,” he said.

“The reason why we’re doing those is because that’s where our areas of expertise are, and some of the problems have come up a lot, are the ones that people have been most concerned about, and, in some ways, are the ones that people have had the most successes with. So we really want to identify the successes as well as any potential barriers.”

Ronis said researchers will be studying administrative databases, the information collected by government agencies and community organizations.

“So, for example, if somebody goes to their doctor, some data is collected — whether it’s the diagnosable code, the treatment the person had, or other things, like demographic information,” he said.

“That’s one example of a database. But there are many others, for example, in Education, some data are collected as well as in Public Safety, the Department of Social Development, the Department of Health. The idea is to look at the patient journeys — how does one person access different levels of treatment at different times? And, are some more successful than others?”

The study will also involve a thorough review of data collected by national agencies, such as Statistics Canada.

“One of the data-sets that they have is the (National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth),” he said.

“They go into the schools and ask a lot of questions of everyone in the school and they follow them up over time. That’s really important in terms of identifying what are the needs in terms of mental health.”

They’ll also be collecting information directly from first-hand sources.

“We’ll also be asking people open-ended questions. We’re going to be interviewing children, parents and service-providers about how people access services across the four provinces,” he said.

And, Ronis said, researchers will also be exploring the economic aspects of this issue.

“We have a number of economists on the team who are going to be putting monetary figures to things,” he said.

“You can sort of identify the value of things, given the costs to society or the possible revenues for society. If someone has been dealing with a mental health problem and they become a taxpayer, that’s an added benefit for society. One of the things that we’ll be looking at is that putting resources into one area might actually produce benefits in other areas.”

These are the early days in what looks like a five-year project.

“You can’t go out and collect data tomorrow and then publish a study the next day. It doesn’t happen that quickly. But one of the things we’ll be doing initially is pulling together the literature, what’s already been studied,” he said.

“We came up with what we’ll be working on over the first six to 12 months and one of the projects that we identified was to look at how the information was shared across treatment providers, various government sectors. If, for example, a government sector is working well, how are they sharing that information compared to other government sectors? Or, in terms of within a single region, how does one person share information with another?”

And the researchers are still figuring out how to share their findings once the project has been completed.

“It’s not just enough to learn about the things that we want to study. We also have to present it,” he said, noting that they’ll be publishing their findings in peer-reviewed academic journals, attending conferences and research lectures to present the results publicly, creating an interactive web-portal and hosting workshops for communities, service providers and public officials.