Innovation in Mental Healthcare: Painting a Picture of the Possible
The head of Canada’s Digital Supercluster wants to develop solutions to tackle how mental health is treated.
This blog features highlights from conversations about mental healthcare transformation on the Wicked Mind pod, hosted by Dr. Diane McIntosh. Listen to the full conversation with Sue Paish and then explore others in the Wicked Mind series.
Sue Paish has seen first-hand how Canadians living with mental illness are treated in primary care. The CEO of Canada’s Digital Supercluster, a government initiative aimed at furthering digital innovation, has had her own personal experience with a loved one who urgently needed mental healthcare.
“We were at an emergency clinic dedicated to mental health with a loved one for the third time in about six weeks. This was a few years ago. After about three or four hours of waiting, we were taken into a room,” Paish recalls. “A nurse sat down and said, ‘I’ve got good news and bad.’
“The bad news is that you have a mental illness. If you had cancer, I’d be telling you that there are so many services available to you that you can’t possibly use them all. But you don’t have cancer, you have a mental illness. There are no services. Please never come back here.”
“The good news? “The good news is you have a loving, supportive, and caring family. And that’s the only thing that’s gonna get you through this because our health system is not going to help you.”
This experience left Paish reeling. But it also sparked a desire to harness the power of technology to develop solutions that can help. She knew it was necessary to work with health professionals, technology experts, academics, all supported by solid scientific evidence, to create innovative solutions. She believes the Supercluster can help to solve the challenges facing mental healthcare delivery in Canada.
“Within the Supercluster model, organizations work together to create solutions to the problem with the theory being we’ll create better solutions together than any one of us would on our own,” says Paish. She says the group invests in the development of solutions and brings forward a business plan which is reviewed and approved. “We co-invest with taxpayer’s dollars 30 cents on every private sector investment dollar,” she says.
Overcoming Hurdles in Innovation in Healthcare
Paish says the situation with the current healthcare system poses a challenge when it comes to rolling out mental health initiatives. “Our healthcare system is slow, ineffective and impersonal,” she says. She shared a story from her time as CEO of Pharmasave, when they developed the first online access to medication information for the most commonly prescribed medications. They were met with a lot of resistance across many segments of the health sector. Concerns like “patients won’t understand this information,” “it will cause frustration,” “people need to have face-to-face consultations.” Paish’s response? “Right now, people don’t have the information because they don’t read the paper that comes with the prescription. So that was the first time I thought, okay, well, we can actually do things that haven’t been done before.”
So how do you overcome resistance to innovation in healthcare? Paish says, “One of the first things I do is paint a picture of the possible.”
From her interview with Dr. Diane McIntosh, these are some of Paish’s thoughts on creating meaningful, sustainable change in our mental healthcare system:
Separate mental health and substance abuse. They’re not the same thing.
One of the first things she’d like to change is how mental health is viewed. “As long as we combine mental health and substance use in the same sentence, we are doing a disservice to the millions of people across the country who have mental health issues that are in no way related to substance use. When you have the mindset that mental health and substance use are inextricably intertwined, these people are marginalized and don’t receive service.”
Pain management and substance abuse.
“If you look at post-surgical pain management in this province [BC], it’s still very much opioid-based. Patients are given a few weeks’ supply for pain management. By the end of that period, when the individual goes to see their healthcare practitioner, they might be in the early stages of misuse or addiction. In the UK, pain management for a lot of post-surgical patients consists of aspirin or Tylenol with regular follow ups.”
Paish added, “We have early stage technology where you could be taking Tylenol or aspirin for post-surgical pain and be able to contact virtually instantly a healthcare professional if your pain is unmanageable and you can be coached through. Pain management can include opioids, but why do we continue to build the supply chain of potential people in the substance use trajectory by only offering them opioids post-surgically?”
Expand access to mental health services at a variety of levels.
Paish believes that mental health services need to be as accessible as cancer care services. She says that these programs need to be carefully designed with the input of a diverse group of stakeholders. It’s why she feels the Supercluster, which brings together academics, researchers and physicians from across Canada to inform the creation of new technologies that can help patients, including those struggling with their mental health, is critical.
But before any change can happen, the collective mindset needs to change, says Paish. This means that mental health needs to be viewed as a medical concern as important as cancer.
At the moment, she’s cautiously optimistic, given that more provinces are adopting programs to address mental health issues. Recently, B.C.’s Fraser Health launched a virtual mental health platform, with other provincial health authorities expressing interest. “Curiosity is all I’m looking for right now,” Paish says.
She’s also a firm believer that the siloed approach to healthcare in Canada also needs to end. “Turning our minds towards building a healthcare system for 38 million people rather than 13 different healthcare systems is a good start,” Paish says.
Failing to do so could further entrench our healthcare crisis. “We have to do better as a society or there won’t be enough beds to take care of these people,” says Paish. “We’ve got to figure this out together.”
Listen to the full episode>>
You can also read the transcript>>
This blog post is part of a series looking at the state of our mental healthcare system and ways we can create sustainable change to improve quality and outcomes for anyone impacted by mental illness.
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