CIHR Team Grant : National Evidence Platform: Youth Mental Health – Application

Well-being, Health and Biomedical Discovery

Deadlines

Academic Unit: Inquire with unit

Memorial Deadline: Monday 5th, October 2026

External Deadline: Thursday 8th, October 2026

Description

The current funding opportunity is part of the Youth Mental Health Fund (YMHF), supported by the Government of Canada’s strategic investment to create lasting and meaningful improvements in the mental health of youth and their families through enhanced mental health services across diverse communities in Canada. It will support a National Platform for Evidence-Based Programs and Practices for Youth Mental Health (the Platform), that, supported by its representative governance structure, will:

1. – define and operationalize evidence standards, and ways of knowing (Evidence Framework) for youth mental health interventions, programs and practices;
2. – review and rate evidence on mental health interventions, programs and practices according to the Evidence Framework;
3. – host a publicly accessible registry of reviewed and rated interventions, and
4. – mobilize learnings to support policy and decision-makers, practitioners, youth and families in making evidence-informed decisions regarding youth mental health interventions.

It will respond to the unique mental health and knowledge mobilization needs of our diverse population, including French-speaking youth; Black youth; Indigenous youth; young women and girls; youth who identify as 2SLGBTQI+; youth living in low-income households; refugee, newcomer or immigrant youth; youth residing in rural and remote areas; youth experiencing systemic discrimination and racism; and to the unique context of social welfare and public health systems across jurisdictions. Youth mental health interventions include interventions, programs and practices that aim to prevent, and/or reduce the symptoms of mental health, substance use, and/or neurodevelopmental conditions, including clinic-, school- or community-based, psychological, pharmacological, eMental-Health (e-MH) interventions, and strategies to increase access and adherence to these interventions.

Evidence platforms or clearinghouses (see examples under Additional Information) are frequently used in healthcare and public health to provide a useful repository of rated programs and practices (i.e. interventions) that help evaluate and disseminate information on what interventions work, in what context, and for whom. By conducting evidence reviews on the efficacy and effectiveness of interventions and translating scientific evidence into accessible ratings or classifications, they can play a central role in decision-making, including for users with minimum knowledge of research methodologies. By translating complex research findings into accessible and trusted evidence grading, such registries can equip policy and decision-makers, system leaders and practitioners with the evidence they need to make informed decisions about program selection, implementation and scale-up.

In the field of mental health, several international evidence platforms serve as centralized, transparent resources that review the effectiveness of prevention, treatment and service delivery interventions. Such registries can be helpful in connecting policy and decision-makers to key information on mental health interventions, including their target populations, their logic models or theories of change, pathways to access them, as well as help identify and highlight evidence gaps. However, there is currently no Canadian evidence-based registry of mental health interventions. Additionally, there are currently no national standards or commonly agreed-upon criteria to review and evaluate mental health interventions tailored to the Canadian health system, populations, regulatory frameworks and broader context.

For e-MH tools and interventions, often used to interact with youth remotely, less high-quality research exists on their effectiveness, clinical impact, quality, and usability across diverse populations and real-world contexts. E-MH tools and interventions also tend to feature less on existing mental health evidence-based platforms. As such, mental health practitioners, program planners, policy and decision-makers either lack the resources to guide decision-making on the use of e-MH tools or youth mental health interventions in general, or they need to rely on registries designed for contexts outside of Canada, which limits their capacity to select effective, safe and culturally-relevant interventions, programs, and practices.

The Platform will be designed in alignment with national and international evidence standards and for long-term sustainability and scalability, to allow expansion across jurisdictions, populations and emerging priority areas. It will be designed to both inform and be informed by Youth Mental Health Fund-supported interventions, other interventions and programs studied in Canada, and where relevant, outside of Canada, including leveraging knowledge created by the simultaneous funding opportunities (e.g., Integrated Youth Services-Network (IYS-Net) Evaluation and Implementation Science to Generate Evidence on Youth Mental Health Interventions). It will define and operationalize a multidimensional Evidence Framework, which will review evidence accordingly, and will publicly disseminate outcomes of evidence evaluation and reviews.

See ResearchNet for more information.

Funding Sources

Canadian Institute of Health Research (CIHR)