Program manager perspectives on the service system to meet the needs of youth with concurrent disorders: findings from a Canadian national survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Concurrent mental health and substance use issues are a serious problem for adolescents and transition-aged youth. Service providers across sectors must be involved in informing system change to meet youth needs. This study examines stakeholder perspectives on services for youth with concurrent disorders including 1) clinical issues in youth services; 2) priority system issues; and 3) optimal knowledge translation strategies to enhance researcher-stakeholder communication. METHODS: A database of youth clinical services across Canada was developed. Program managers (n = 481) at cross-sectoral (mental health, addictions, justice, child welfare, advocacy, and outreach) youth-serving (aged 12-24) programs were invited to complete an online survey; 232 responded. Survey questions concerned youth needs, program characteristics, priorities for service system enhancement; and usual and preferred knowledge translation methods. RESULTS: Across service sectors, the mean estimated proportion of youth using services with concurrent mental health and substance use problems was 55%. Program managers reported routine screening for mental health and substance use concerns (66%), referring to other agencies to meet the concurrent disorder needs of youth (54%), offering specific programming for concurrent disorders (42%), and program evaluation (48%). Notably, mental health programs were significantly less likely to offer concurrent disorders services than addictions programs. Where services do exist, most are targeted at youth aged 12-18 years, with fewer services available for transition-aged youth. Endorsement of various system change goals exceeded 80%, with a particular emphasis on improving access to services (49%), ensuring a continuum of services for varying levels of severity (37%), and improved integration across sectors (36%). Preferred knowledge exchange methods were workshops and websites for receiving information; and focus groups or surveys, rather than intensive participation on research teams, to inform research. CONCLUSIONS: There is a high need to build capacity across most sectors for meeting the needs of youth with co-occurring mental health and substance use problems, especially for transition-aged youth. In addition, limits in program evaluation should be addressed. Innovative knowledge exchange strategies are needed to better meet the needs of youth with concurrent disorders. Although service providers expressed readiness to participate in service enhancement and knowledge translation activities, effective, feasible approaches must integrate strategies likely to result in desired clinical outcomes, given clinical workload challenges.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".