Kinark would like to thank and recognize the Durham Core Service Providers for their ongoing collaboration and commitment to children and youth mental health:
Community Engagement
In collaboration with Durham community partner agencies, Kinark has been working to identify supports, services, and pathways into, through and out of child and youth mental health services.
To view a PowerPoint presentation providing information about Kinark and Moving On Mental Health (MOMH), click here.
2015/16 Service Delivery Plans
In our role as Lead Agency in Durham, Kinark was responsible for leading the development of two plans and submitting them to Ministry of Children and Youth Services (MCYS) for March 31, 2016.
The Core Service Delivery Plan (CSDP) required Kinark to engage specifically with Durham’s core service providers and provide a summary of current child and youth mental health (CYMH) services, an inventory of existing intake/access points and pathways, and identify three priorities to be carried out in 2016/2017.
The Community Mental Health Plan (CMHP) required descriptions of CYMH services currently being offered in Durham with a focus on targeted prevention, identifying pathways to, through and out of care and creating an inventory of existing community planning mechanisms.
2015/2016 Core Service Delivery Plan
2015/2016 Community Mental Health Plan
Next Steps
Priority #1: Strengthening Engagement/Building a Community Planning Framework
Understanding that effective engagement is a cornerstone of good planning, providers in Durham have agreed to invest considerable time and effort in 2016/17 to ensure that the engagement mechanisms required to facilitate future work are appropriately inclusive, efficient and effective.
Based on further analysis of existing mechanisms for engagement in Durham and the effectiveness, together we will build and validate the engagement mechanisms that will be used as the primary means to transform child and youth mental health services in Durham.
Priority #2: Validating the current service landscape for children’s mental health funding
Moving on Mental Health has at its core the requirement to establish clear service pathways so that children youth and families can better access and understand the CYMH system. Implicit is the requirement for service providers to understand the respective roles they each play in effective service provision and the alignment of that service provision with defined core services and key processes. It is essential to validate our current service landscape before we contemplate any further development of services.
In 2016/17 Kinark will engage with both core and non-core CYMH providers to better understand and clarify the data associated with the current service plans of core service providers and the service delivery of non-core providers, and drive to a more comprehensive and common understanding of the Durham area.
Priority #3: Determining the current client profile in the Durham service area
In order to effectively deliver CYMH services in Durham, Kinark and all Durham core service providers identified the need to establish a common understanding of the profiles of children, youth and their families who are currently accessing services, the services they are accessing and the potentially unmet needs of children and families now and in the future.
In 2016/2017 we will create a profile of current Durham child and youth mental health service recipients and their families to better understand who is in service, their clinical needs and the services they are receiving and will analyze the current and future child/youth population in Durham to establish Durham’s population’s needs for child and youth mental health services and assess to what extent current services meet needs.
Priority #4: Strengthening core service delivery
Embedded in the language of MOMH is the support for, and continued development of, clinical practices that effectively address the mental health needs of clients seeking treatment and maintain a level of competency that promotes best practice and improved clinical outcomes. Clinical supervision and resources to support and maintain clinical practice is necessary to ensure ongoing quality of service delivery.
In the next year, Kinark, in collaboration with the core service providers in the Durham area, will identify a regional framework for Dialectical Behavioural Therapy as a pilot within the service area that looks at the progression of training, implementation of evidence based therapy and the regional or shared clinical supervision and support to the therapy across organizations.