Online directory helps to connect patients with resources

by Michael Cheng, MD, FRCPC
Medical Head, Children’s Unit, Inpatient Psychiatry Program
Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario

I don’t know about you, but people have always asked me questions about local mental health services—whether it is patients, families, fellow professionals, or someone I’ve just met at a party.

“So you’re a psychiatrist…I have a son with such-and-such…,” or “I’m having problems with this-or-that...” “Where can I get help?”

If I was lucky to know a good resource, then I would write it down for them. Families would be happy most of the time, but it was saddening how often I’d hear, “If only I had known about this a year ago…,” or “If only I had known about this while I was still a teenager…”

Many times I wouldn’t know what to recommend. And rarely would I have a copy of that local community resource directory—because usually someone else had my copy, or if they didn’t, my copy was out of date. Looking on the Internet often simply led to more confusion.

The birth of eMentalHealth.ca
One day, I said to myself, “Surely there must be a better way—there must be a website somewhere out there with information about local mental health resources?” But there wasn’t, and from that was born the vision for eMentalhealth.ca—to create an online mental health directory where anyone could go to find out where to get help.

Before long I met Amy Martin, a clinician at the Crossroads Children’s Centre, a children’s mental health agency that serves children with severe behavioural and emotional difficulties. As a fortunate coincidence, she shared the same vision.

With the support of Cherry Murray, executive director at Crossroads, we obtained a set of start-up grants from the City of Ottawa and the Community Foundation of Ottawa and hired a brilliant web developer, John Withnall. It wasn’t long before eMentalHealth.ca became a reality.

We were able to keep our costs down by using open source technologies, such as PHP and MySQL, rather than purchasing expensive proprietary software licenses.

Using eMentalHealth.ca
The website serves as on online mental health resource directory where visitors can look for information on where to get help in Ottawa, and includes a mental health events calendar listing upcoming workshops, programs, seminars and meetings. It is free to use, confidential, and can be accessed 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Visitors to the homepage can browse a table of contents by category, such as crisis or emergency resources, self-help, mutual aid and support groups, and counseling agencies. They can also use the search box and simply type in keywords to find the type of services they need.

Once the user has located a resource, or a list of resources, he/she can then choose to either print out the information, or email it to someone.

Therefore, the busy healthcare professional can easily email or print off a list of counseling services to give to a patient. And better yet, individuals anywhere can simply visit the website and find out where to get help, within the privacy of their very own home.

Database maintenance
The database listing several hundred resources was initially entered by Amy Martin and myself, which was not too difficult as both of us happen to be reasonably knowledgeable about local resources—and because neither of us have children yet.

An advisory board helps to ensure content integrity. Members currently include Cynthia Clark, executive director of Parents’ Lifelines of Eastern Ontario, a mutual aid group for parents of youth with mental health issues), Jennifer Forbes, a communications consultant and mental health advocate, and Vanessa Woods, a social worker at the Royal Ottawa Hospital.

Ongoing website maintenance occurs through the power of ‘distributed content management’, whereby visitors can click on a form to email changes to current listings, or tell us about new ones.

Initial feedback
Formal program evaluation is in the planning stages. However, initial feedback from users has been positive.

“Consumers and family members are coming to us with more information and questions about services and programs. I would hope a valuable community resource such as eMentalHealth will be bookmarked on every health service provider and family physician’s desktop,” said Colleen MacPhee, co-chair of First Line Services, Champlain Mental Health Network in 2006. “We need to get the word out and have providers use this service as a main hub for information.”

In a 2006 speech marking World Mental Health Day, Senator Mobina Jaffer asked her fellow senators to promote the initiative in their own regions so that all Canadians can have access to similar resources.

Still filling a need
Since the creation of eMentalHealth.ca in 2005, other similar website initiatives have been launched. There is now an online resource directory from the Ottawa Community Information Centre and a 24 hour information and referral service, Mental Health Service Information Ontario, with both a website and 1-800 telephone number. Nonetheless, eMentalHealth.ca still manages to fill a unique niche and complements rather than competes with these other services.

The focus of eMentalHealth.ca is on mental health resources as opposed to all social services. Our listings are not only directed at adults, but also contain information on child and youth services. We also include government as well as non-government funded services such as support groups and various private practice resources.

Ottawa today, the rest of Canada tomorrow?
An exciting future is on the horizon. While eMentalHealth.ca is currently limited to mental health resources in the Ottawa area, other communities are showing interest in developing their own online resource directories.

We are also partnering with other major children’s mental health organizations and will expand the database to include the rest of Ontario since there is currently no province-wide directory of children’s mental health resources.

Plans are also in the works to include information on illnesses so in addition to learning what services exist for a certain condition, a visitor to the site can also read up on some important facts about the illness.

And for organizations who already have their own (possibly expensive proprietary) database systems. It is our hope that those organizations might consider using open source technologies such as ours so that the money they save might be channeled more efficiently into other activities.

Indeed, it is our ultimate goal to find government or corporate donors so that this service could be offered freely to any communities that wish it.

Life after eMentalHealth.ca
On one level, things haven’t changed much since eMentalHealth.ca was set up. I am still busy and overworked. I still get asked a million questions about local resources.

But now when I’m asked, I can use eMentalHealth.ca to locate services and email or print the information for parents directly from the website, or I can just tell the family to go visit the site and click on the appropriate category. At the end of the day, I am able to connect families to resources in less time, and more efficiently than before.

Now, if only I could manage to leave work earlier and not keep missing my martial arts classes.

Acknowledgements
eMentalHealth.ca acknowledges the support of Dr. Simon Davidson, Dr. Ian Manion and Ms. Karen Kidder at the Provincial Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health (in Ottawa), as well as Karen Tataryn and Joanne Lowe of the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario.

© Copyright 2007. Canadian Psychiatry Aujourd’hui. All rights reserved.

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