The validation of the Western Canada Waiting List Children’s Mental Health-Priority Criteria Score Instrument: 2002 – 2015 results

Objective: To assess the validity of the Western Canada Waiting List Children’s Mental Health-Priority Criteria Score (WCWLCMH-PCS) Instrument.Methods: The WCWL-CMH-PCS Instrument was developed in order to prioritize the delivery of child and youth mental health (CYMH) services through standardized measures of urgency. We draw on two data sets describing the PCS scores among patients who have sought CYMH care. The first data set was collected during the first phase of pilot testing for the WCWL-CMH-PCS Instrument (from January – June 2000), during which trained intake workers applied the PCS items to 817 patients aged 5-18 years throughout the three western provinces. The second data set comprises the application of a refined version of the WCWL-CMH-PCS Instrument to 22,013 patients aged 0-19 throughout the Calgary Health Region from 2002 – 2015. For our analysis, we compare the two samples in order to determine the percentage of patients that correspond to specific risk categories for each priority score.Results: For the overall pairwise correlation by item, r = 0.96 and is statistically significant at the .05 level (p < .05). We discovered that there are small differences in the assessments of urgency for access to specialized care, severity of symptoms, family and social factors, and the expected results of care between the two samples. The absolute difference per item is not greater than 12.0%.Conclusions: Overall, our results support the empirical applicability and usefulness of the WCWL-CMH-PCS Instrument within CYMH clinical settings.