Presenters
- Rachal Pattison, MSc.OT, M.Sc., Reseach Manager & Mental Health Clinician, Kickstand, Edmonton, AB, Canada
- Vincent Agyapong, MD, PhD, FRCPC, Clinical Professor, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
- Katherine Hay, MScOT, Director, Operations and Service Innovation, Kickstand, Edmonton, AB, Canada
- patient/young person TBD
Summary
Kickstand is an Alberta-based, integrated youth services initiative that seeks to bring together a range of primary care, mental health, substance use and social services, as a one stop shop model of care. We hope to transform access to care by aligning existing youth services in such a way that young people and their families only need to walk through one door to be connected to all the services they need within Alberta’s health system. We know it can be hard to cope with everything that “growing up” throws at you; we’ve all been there. Exacerbating this, young people now face being physically separated from important people and activities in their support system. This is why Kickstand has partnered with Dr Vincent Agyapong, psychiatrist and professor (University of Alberta), to create MoreGoodDays, a supportive text messaging program designed to help alleviate these struggles. MoreGoodDays is a daily dose of inspiration and advice delivered to users’ phones via text message and has been created through extensive engagement with young people in Alberta. It is an evidence-based, evidence-generating tool proven to be helpful in developing healthy coping skills and resiliency. Evidence from two similar, Alberta-based, text messaging programs, Text4Mood and Text4Hope, had respondents report increased mental well-being, feelings of hopefulness and increased perception of being in-charge of depression and anxiety symptoms. Additionally, subscribers to Text4Hope who had received daily messages demonstrated lower prevalence rates for moderate/high stress, anxiety and depression symptoms, compared to people who did not receive daily messages. Our presentation will cover the approach we took to embed youth engagement into every phase of this project, tell you more about the project itself, as well as describe the evidence for supportive text messaging programs like it. MoreGoodDays is a small but important first step to help young people in Alberta to have more good days.
Objectives
- gain awareness of our provincial initiative and network
- learn about an innovative, effective and simple method to provide support to young people
- learn an effective and meaningful approach to engaging and involving young people in the development of the messages for this mental health service