Promoting Staff and Physician Well-Being With a Single-Day Event: Event Satisfaction and Perceived Well-Being Benefits of an Addiction and Mental Health Sports Day.

Background: Addiction and mental health (AMH) professionals often experience high levels of burnout, which can lead to detrimental outcomes for patient care and safety and the AMH professional themselves. Interventions aimed at improving well-being can be useful to tackle the issues surrounding burnout. Specifically, implementing activity-based events (ABEs), which encourages individuals to be more physically active, can be useful in improving physical, mental, and social well-being. Alberta Health Services AMH, Edmonton Zone, implemented a Sports Day event to promote well-being as a way to help offset the risk of burnout. Methods: This was an online anonymous cross-sectional, postsurvey evaluation. The postsurvey was administered to 243 AMH staff and physicians who registered for Sports Day. Findings: The responses from 66 AMH staff and physician attendees indicated that individuals were highly satisfied with the event and felt that Sports Day promoted positive mental and physical well-being, helped to develop a sense of community, and strengthened colleague relationships. Conclusions/Application to Professional Practice: The results build on the literature examining the effects of single-day ABEs and can be implemented by health care organizations to promote staff and physician well-being via increased physical activity. Single-day ABEs, like Sports Day, can promote mental, physical, and social well-being. Organizing a sports day event is a feasible way to help offset the risk of burnout and is generally well received by individuals.

Transforming youth mental health services in a large urban centre: ACCESS Open Minds Edmonton.

AIM: This paper outlines the transformation of youth mental health services in Edmonton, Alberta, a large city in Western Canada. We describe the processes and challenges involved in restructuring how services and care are delivered to youth (11-25 years old) with mental health needs based on the objectives of the pan-Canadian ACCESS Open Minds network. METHODS: We provide a narrative review of how youth mental health services have developed since our engagement with the ACCESS Open Minds initiative, based on its five central objectives of early identification, rapid access, appropriate care, continuity of care, and youth and family engagement. RESULTS: Building on an initial community mapping exercise, a service network has been developed; teams that were previously age-oriented have been integrated together to seamlessly cover the age 11 to 25 range; early identification has thus far focused on high-school populations; and an actual drop-in space facilitates rapid access and linkages to appropriate care within the 30-day benchmark. CONCLUSIONS: Initial aspects of the transformation have relied on restructuring and partnerships that have generated early successes. However, further transformation over the longer term will depend on data demonstrating how this has impacted clinical outcomes and service utilization. Ultimately, sustainability in a large urban centre will likely involve scaling up to a network of similar services to cover the entire population of the city.

Canadian response to need for transformation of youth mental health services: ACCESS Open Minds (Esprits ouverts).

AIM: Youth mental health is of paramount significance to society globally. Given early onset of mental disorders and the inadequate access to appropriate services, a meaningful service transformation, based on globally recognized principles, is necessary. The aim of this paper is to describe a national Canadian project designed to achieve transformation of mental health services and to evaluate the impact of such transformation on individual and system related outcomes. METHOD: We describe a model for transformation of services for youth with mental health and substance abuse problems across 14 geographically, linguistically and culturally diverse sites, including large and small urban, rural, First Nations and Inuit communities as well as homeless youth and a post-secondary educational setting. The principles guiding service transformation and objectives are identical across all sites but the method to achieve them varies depending on prevailing resources, culture, geography and the population to be served and how each community can best utilize the extra resources for transformation. RESULTS: Each site is engaged in community mapping of services followed by training, active stakeholder engagement with youth and families, early case identification initiatives, providing rapid access (within 72 hours) to an assessment of the presenting problems, facilitating connection to an appropriate service within 30 days (if required) with no transition based on age within the 11 to 25 age group and a structured evaluation to track outcomes over the period of the study. CONCLUSIONS: Service transformation that is likely to achieve substantial change involves very detailed and carefully orchestrated processes guided by a set of values, principles, clear objectives, training and evaluation. The evidence gathered from this project can form the basis for scaling up youth mental health services in Canada across a variety of environments.