Lost in Transition? Health Service Utilization of IWK Mental Health and Addictions Patients on Transition to Adult Services

Abstract

The objective of this thesis was to improve our understanding of transition aged youth accessing public Mental Health & Addictions (MHA) services in Nova Scotia and identify potential inequities using routinely collected health administrative data. Specifically, we aimed to: 1) describe transition aged youths’ demographics and service use patterns; 2) estimate the associations between clinical, demographic, and socioeconomic factors with attendance to adult MHA services; 3) assess the associations’ sensitivity using a two-visit definition of attendance. We created a retrospective cohort of youth known to IWK MHA services from 2016-2019 and linked them with Nova Scotia Health MHA data. Using multi-level logistic regression, we measured the unadjusted associations of the selected factors with adult MHA attendance. Across both definitions of attendance, MHA-related Emergency Department use, community-level proportion of single parent households, and presenting concern categories were associated with attendance to adult MHA services. Certain associations may be indicative of inequities.