Mental-health, addictions needs not being met, says study of five provinces

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This article was published 30/08/2017 (3311 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new study makes clear that Canada has a lot of work left to do when it comes to making sure that young people struggling with mental-health illnesses and addictions are getting adequate care.

Manitoba, in particular, needs to take steps to address high number of attempted suicides. The province has the disturbing distinction of having the highest rate out of the five provinces that participated in the study, despite having the smallest population.

“Youth with mental-health (issues) and addictions are really struggling to get the care they need and to have that care sustained,” said James Bolton, director of research in the University of Manitoba’s psychiatry department.

Bolton headed up the Manitoba section of the study, which was years in the making and looked at care and outcomes in Manitoba, Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. It was published online Wednesday by the Centre for Applied Research in Mental Health and Addiction at Simon Fraser University.

While there have been previous mental-health reports national in scope, Bolton said this study is the first to really drill down into the issues and offer comparisons between provinces. Only five provinces were included, he said, because administrative health data varies province to province and the others weren’t able to provide it.

“It’s the first time we’ve really been able to examine the quality of mental-health services and the outcomes,” he said, “it provides much more detail about how many people are able to see a family doctor on a regular basis or whether they get their care in an emergency department or not.”

In some positive news for Manitoba, it has the smallest percentage of patients with mental-health disorders or addictions for whom their first point of contact — the first time in at least two years they’re receiving treatment for mental-health reasons — is not the emergency room.

That’s encouraging, the study notes, because in most cases “a crisis presentation indicates a failure of early symptom identification and treatment, which is best for longer-term positive outcomes.”

Emergency room as first point of contact was one of six performance indicators that researchers settled on to be able to compare mental-health and addictions care delivery across the country. The others were: access to the same family physician; doctor followup after discharge from hospital; rates of suicides; rates of suicide attempts; and mortality of those with diagnosed disorders.

By using those indicators to cut through regional differences in health-care delivery, Bolton said the researchers have created a jumping-off point for more standardized reporting processes — and that’s important.

“It’s vital to know what’s going on at the ground level within each province so we can know how to improve things at the local level,” he said.

In Manitoba, the study makes it clear the province needs a better understanding of what drives suicide attempts.

“We need to be mobilizing resources for the youth in our province,” Bolton said.

Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen called the report “concerning and troubling.”

The province is expecting a consulting report back by the end of the year about the development of a provincial mental-health and addictions strategy, which Goertzen said he expects will help ensure “access to the system in a more efficient way.”

He said its likely that “a significant part, if not all of that report” will be made public.

jane.gerster@freepress.mb.ca

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