Co-designing an integrated care pathway for mental health and early dementia within a community-academic partnership

We used a co-design approach to gain foundational knowledge and further develop and adapt an integrated care pathway for mental health to the assisted living setting through the creation of a community-academic partnership. Integrated care pathways (ICP) are a patient-focused approach to delivering optimal patient care while improving patient outcomes and clinical effectiveness. However, recommended pathways are often prescribed based on clinical and research evidence without the involvement of those who will be affected or the setting and staff delivering the care.

We engaged residents, providers/staff, and manager/directors from a single community site in a series of co-design workshops to develop a tailored ICP. Each partner group was engaged separately and each workshop had a theme and specific activities to elicit their needs, perspectives and experiences. The workshops were as follows: (1) Co-Create the Vision and Gather the Experience, (2) Understand and Improve the Experience, (3) Turn the Experience into Action. Activities were planned according to the severity of mental health concerns and drew upon the principles and strategies of patient, public and community engagement. Feedback from each partner group was synthesized and then learnings across all three partners groups were integrated into a new ICP which was also mapped onto implementation considerations.

Using a co-design approach, we adapted an ICP originally developed for the primary care setting to the context of assisted living. Future directions involve planning a follow up research study to measure the ICP’s use, effectiveness and impacts on the quality of mental health care in assisted living.