The Centre recognizes that it is not always easy to “know what we know” about child and youth mental health and consequently engages in two types of research activity specifically to address this challenge.

• Systematic Reviews
  Systematic reviews synthesize as much of the existing empirical evidence as possible in order to reveal knowledge about a child and youth mental health question.

• Critical Appraisal of Clinical Practice Guidelines
  Clinical practice guidelines are synthesis documents based on evidence and practice. Critical appraisal reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence that supports the individual recommendations.

Both activities reveal evidence-based answers to questions, which result in recommendations that can guide decision-making, practice and policy in child and youth mental health. Both represent enormous investments of time and resources. As such, the Centre has focused on priorities that fit closely with our Mission. Our Committees are an important source of advice in determining priorities.

These activities complement the Centre’s wider research agenda, including internal research and external research funded through the Grants and Awards program.

Assessing the Evidence-Base

The following document contains a list of validated tools used to assess the quality of randomized controlled trials, clinical practice guidelines and systematic reviews, as well as tools for assessing other study design types. We provide here, the primary studies and examples of supporting documentation.

Quality Assessment Tools

The Centre employs a flexible, transparent, explicit and scientifically defensible methodology. It is very similar for both systematic reviews and critical appraisals of clinical practice guidelines.

Download the Centre's Evidence Framework