Project Summary
Background: Improving youth and young adult (Y/YA) pathways to care following onset of nascent serious mental illness is a critical public health issue. To advance research in this area, multi-stakeholder involvement and leadership in research is necessary but currently underdeveloped and underutilized.
Proposed Solution:
• Develop a Tampa Bay stakeholder advisory network (SAN) bringing together Y/YA patients, families, and other key stakeholders
• Implement research involvement workshops around the Bay area tailored to diverse stakeholder groups
• Organize a series of mentored stakeholder-led needs assessments designed to meaningfully build research capacity among groups with no prior research training or involvement
Objectives:
- Convene a (SAN) focused on the role of emergency and crisis services/response in Y/YA pathways to care
- Work with the SAN members to organize research involvement workshops
- Mentor five capacity-building stakeholder-led needs assessment teams
- Document the project through mixed methods evaluation and disseminate results
- Fully include Y/YA patients and stakeholders. Long-term objectives are to: help establish greater precedent (“proof of concept”) for meaningful, non-tokenistic research involvement for Y/YA with serious mental illness; move the field toward a more inclusive, stakeholder-engaged model, in which patient and family co-leadership is viewed as essential; and help build a regional network of stakeholder leaders, including patients and families.
Activities: Activities include bimonthly SAN meetings, development and delivery of research involvement workshops, and USF mentorship of stakeholder-led needs assessments.
Outcomes and Outputs:
- Development of a Y/YA-focused (SAN) that will serve as a mechanism for multi-stakeholder dialogue and lay the foundation for collaborative “pathways to care” patient-centered, comparative effectiveness research projects
- Development, implementation, and evaluation of a series of stakeholder research involvement workshops designed to build capacity among broader stakeholders, and produce accessible workshop curricula tailored to different groups and available for use by other teams
- Development and evaluation of mentored capacity-building stakeholder-led needs assessments designed to nurture a group of stakeholders with tangible skills for designing and conducting small-scale projects. Full description of the needs assessment mentoring process will be made available to the public. All components will be evaluated and disseminated in the form of high-impact publications and briefs designed to raise the visibility of stakeholder engagement in the project team’s focus areas.
Patient and Stakeholder Engagement Plan: Key stakeholders impacted by the project include Y/YA with significant mental health challenges, family members, and frontline providers spanning the emergency and outpatient systems, and both children’s and adult systems of care. Stakeholders will be engaged through the SAN, stakeholder-focused research involvement workshops, and USF-mentored stakeholder-led needs assessment projects.
Collaborators: Collaborators include Youth MOVE Tampa, Success for Kids and Families, BayCare, the Central Florida Behavioral Health Network, Changing Minds Tampa, and the Hispanic Services Council.