Jonny Chard | News Editor
Featured image: The campus-community initiative was conducted by York professors, as well as members of several other organizations around Toronto. | Amir Yazdanparast
Amid the increase in migrants seeking a home in Canada, a York-led team of researchers have developed an interactive tool to aid the mental health disorder assessment process for immigrants and refugees.
The eHealth tool seeks to address the gap in access to mental health care for immigrant groups by offering interactive computer-based self-assessments.
The assessment indicates common mental health disorders such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.
The tool is also equipped to generate individualized reports following an evaluation of social conditions.
The research was conducted by York professor Farah Ahmad with professors Liane Ginsburg, Serban Dinca-Panaitescu and Penny Ng, as well as members of the Access Alliance Multicultural Health and Community Centre, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Women’s College Hospital and U of T.
Dinca-Panaitescu hopes that the tool will help alleviate potential barriers in the assessment process.
“Interactive eHealth tools hold potential to reduce communication barriers and time challenges for both patients and providers to engage in discussions around mental health concerns,” he said.
Due to the growing needs of vulnerable communities that health centres serve, mental health problems may be less likely to be identified than physical health issues.
Ahmad stated that a controlled trial of the tool saw high acceptance among members of ethnocultural and immigrant communities in a Toronto-based Community Health Centre.
“The study found such a tool […] effective in improving mental health discussion and detection in the intervention group compared to the usual care,” she added.
The results show that discussion of mental health increased by up to 18 per cent and detection of symptoms increased by 11 per cent.
“Adoption of such tools at the system level could address access challenges while generating granulated data to inform practice and policy,” said Ginsburg.
Patients using the tool reported few technical difficulties and, along with family physicians and nurse practitioners, found it to be highly beneficial.
With a global rise in mental health disorders, Ahmad and her team are planning to expand their trial to other sites to develop an effective care model that could be generalized to serve any vulnerable population.
The campus-community initiative was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
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