If you get a phone call in the next few months asking about mental health, the Northwestern Health Unit (NWHU) wants you to take the call.
The NWHU announced on Monday that it was launching a new telephone survey that is intended to learn more about local mental health-related perceptions, attitudes and behaviours in the many communities across its catchment area. The survey is being administered by consulting company Prairie Research Associates on behalf of the NWHU and Alex Berry, the NWHU’s manager of Foundational Standards and Communications, said that the survey will help the organization to better understand the needs of communities in the catchment area, and to further help other service providers make plans.
“Really what we’re doing is we’re going to be reaching out to about 1,000 people across the catchment area through the telephone survey to get a sense of mental health and wellness experiences people have, their behaviours and how people are doing, really,” he said.
“That will help to inform our future service delivery as well. We’ll write that up and make that report available to all of the partner agencies that we work with so that it might inform their programming as well.”
To that end, Berry said the NWHU is hoping to inform the public that not only are the calls potentially coming soon, but that they are legitimate calls, not just spam calls or telemarketers. The sample size is large enough that the data collected from the survey will give the NWHU and its partners a good overview of the entire catchment area.
The survey will primarily be done over the phone, so there’s no way to opt in to taking the survey if someone isn’t randomly selected, but those who are contacted by the company administering the survey can request a link to instead provide their answers online, be it because they have difficulties hearing over the phone, or simply need more time to consider their answers.
Berry stressed that the NWHU itself does not run its own mental health treatment services, and the surveys are meant only for information collecting purposes so that once a final report is compiled, other community partners who do run mental health programs can use the data to make adjustments or find where other supports might be necessary.
“What we do at the Health Unit is mental health promotion,” Berry explained.
“Really, what that means for us is, what are the mental health issues in our community, and then to be able to say to people, ‘here are the things that you can do to take care of your mental health.’ We do those sorts of things, which is also partly the link to exercise, eating well, sleeping well, social interactions, all that kind of stuff. We know all those things have an impact on and contribute to or detract from mental health.”
The survey itself will not be overly large and complex, Berry said, with a number of questions that will stick to more general information than highly specific queries, all in the effort to get as comprehensive an idea of mental health awareness and attitudes in the area.
“We’ve collected some standard questions about mental health experience that are used by StatsCan surveys,” Berry explained.
“It’s kinds of things like, ‘how would you rate your mental health,’ ‘what kinds of stresses do you have in your life,’ ‘over the past 12 months how have you been doing?’ Then there are some related questions about alcohol and drug use, because we know that can impact people’s mental health, as well as a couple of questions around COVID.”
While it would seem natural that the timing of the survey is meant to capitalize on and determine the impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the region, Berry said that isn’t necessarily the case, though the impacts of COVID will likely figure into the final results.
“I think there’s just a general conversation amongst service providers and the community at large that mental health is really important, and COVID has had a big impact on everybody’s mental health,” he said.
“We just want to get a sense of that. Lots of the stats that we all have about mental health and wellness are now several years old, and they all predate COVID. This is just the first time we’ve had the chance to say ‘let’s actually ask these questions and see if we can get some up to date information for our region.'”
Berry added the negative impacts COVID has had on people’s mental health will likely ripple into other parts of their lives and mental health, making it even more important to get a good look at how people in the district are feeling.
The survey is currently ongoing and is expected to be wrapped up by the end of the calendar year, so members of the public and service providers within the NWHU catchment area can expect the results to be made available sometime in early 2023.
