The Youth Transition Project was designed to provide youth with mental health and addiction issues with individualized transitional care plans as they transition from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) to Adult Mental Health Services (AMHS). Over an 18-month period, a total of 127 (59.1%) youth were transitioned and seen by an AMHS provider, 41 (19.1%) remained on a waitlist for services and 47 (21.8%) canceled services. The average time to transition was 110 days (SD = 100). Youth exhibited a wide range of diagnoses; 100% of the population was identified as having serious psychiatric problems. Findings demonstrate that the Youth Transition Project has been successful in promoting continuity of care by transitioning youth seamlessly from youth to adult services. Inconsistencies in wait times and service delivery suggest that further model development is needed to enhance the long-term sustainability of the Youth Transition Project.

Note: It is the policy of the Canadian Psychiatric Association to review each position paper, policy statement and clinical practice guideline every five years after publication or last review. Any such document that has been published more than five years ago and does not explicitly state it has been reviewed and retained as an official document of the CPA, either with revisions or as originally published, should be considered as a historical reference document only.

IntroductionThe collaborative care model is an approach providing care to those with mental health and addictions disorders in the primary care setting. There is a robust evidence base demonstrating its clinical and cost-effectiveness in comparison with usual care; however, the transitioning to this new paradigm of care has been difficult. While there are efforts to train and prepare healthcare professionals, not much is known about the current state of collaborative care training programmes. The objective of this scoping review is to understand how widespread these collaborative care education initiatives are, how they are implemented and their impacts.Methods and analysisThe scoping review methodology uses the established review methodology by Arksey and O’Malley. The search strategy was developed by a medical librarian and will be applied in eight different databases spanning multiple disciplines. A two-stage screening process consisting of a title and abstract scan and a full-text review will be used to determine the eligibility of articles. To be included, articles must report on an existing collaborative care education initiative for healthcare providers. All articles will be independently assessed for eligibility by pairs of reviewers, and all eligible articles will be abstracted and charted in duplicate using a standardised form. The extracted data will undergo a ‘narrative review’ or a descriptive analysis of the contextual or process-oriented data and simple quantitative analysis using descriptive statistics.Ethics and disseminationResearch ethics approval is not required for this scoping review. The results of this scoping review will inform the development of a collaborative care training initiative emerging from the Medical Psychiatry Alliance, a four-institution philanthropic partnership in Ontario, Canada. The results will also be presented at relevant national and international conferences and published in a peer-reviewed journal.