Service Design




Making sure that youth have access to the right services, in the right place, at the right time, is critical to supporting their mental health and substance use. That’s why Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario has over 30 Networks that offer high-quality, evidence-based, and integrated services to youth across the province.

One ingredient to achieve better health outcomes for youth is something called measurement-based care, or MBC, which is the use of measurement tools like surveys and questionnaires to guide treatment decisions.
MBC actually has a lot of benefits, like increasing shared decision-making between youth and their service providers. There’s just one problem: MBC isn’t being routinely implemented. Service providers have a lot on their plate already, and sometimes it’s challenging to ask them for more.

But when we did an environmental scan of youth who access services in Ontario, they want MBC. They believe in its value, but just need opportunities to be more involved in the process (“It’s like I just fill out the questionnaire, and poof, I never hear about it again”). 
That’s why we worked with a team of youth lived experts to co-design the MBC Pocket Guide to improve MBC delivery for youth across Ontario. Read more here.



Adolescent depression is prevalent, but treatment can be difficult to navigate and ineffective. A multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the Cundill Centre for Child and Youth Depression developed the CARIBOU Pathway to address the need for scalable and evidence-based treatment for adolescent depression. Read more on the CARIBOU Pathway here.

To ensure the Pathway reflects the needs and interests of youth, I supported the team in designing mechanisms for youth engagement. This included: (1) developing a youth engagement strategy, (2) organizing and facilitating a youth advisory group, (3) co-designing educational material with young people*, (4) liaising communications across various stakeholder groups.

Since development, the Cundill Centre has launched a certificate program in delivering the pathway and is implementing the pathway in multiple community-based centres around Ontario.

*See psychoeducation material here.




In response to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) funded the development of an international and multi-institute database of living healthcare recommendations related to COVID-19—the RecMap. In order to ensure the RecMap could be scaled and utilized by the general public, I worked closely with a team of researchers at the Hospital for Sick Children to co-design a plain language recommendation (PLR) format for each recommendation.

I supported the team in (1) designing a mechanism for engaging community members, (2) facilitated community consultations, (3) designed PLR format prototype, and (4) liaised communications between community members, researchers and web developers.

The COVID-19 RecMap PLR database is live here.
This website is updated every so often. Last updated on 3 June 2025. All contents are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Thanks for visiting :)