Ungsinn (Young Mind) - An Online Journal to Promote Evidence Based Practice in Norway

Helene Eng, Monica Martinussen, Charlotte Reedtz, Joshua Patras, Simon-Peter Neumer

Background: Although knowledge about effective interventions for children and adolescents is regularly made available through scientific journals, most child and adolescent mental health services in Norway are not evidence based. One reason for this may be that knowledge of which interventions that are effective is too difficult or time-consuming to access through traditional channels for research. In order to facilitate the knowledge transfer process is important to summarize research findings regarding the effectiveness of interventions and make the knowledge easily available to practitioners and decision makers.

Methods: Ungsinn (www.ungsinn.no) is a Norwegian online journal publishing systematic reviews about the evidence of psychosocial interventions. The aim of the journal is to facilitate evidence-based practice and also to motivate researchers, practitioners, and the authorities to conduct more research on interventions for children and young people in Norway.

Each paper in the journal includes a description of the intervention followed by an empirical review of the available effect and effectiveness studies, and finally a classification based on available evidence in the Nordic countries. The system for assessing the level of evidence and provide an overall rating of the intervention are based on standards of evidence listed by the Society for Prevention Research and other international systems of grading evidence used in databases and systematic reviews.

Results: Each intervention is classified in one of five levels of evidence. When evaluating the evidence of an intervention, several dimensions are included: The quality of the description of the intervention and methods used, the theoretical foundation, the number of Nordic effect studies, the methodological quality of the studies, effect sizes and systems to ensure good implementation quality. When new effect studies are published, the paper will be revised and the intervention can achieve a higher rating.

Conclusions: Ungsinn is continuously working with several communication strategies to increase its impact on services for children, adolescents and their families. To date, 46 interventions have been reviewed and classified, and the number of page views has increased from 15000 in the first year, 2009 to 53000 in 2015. To facilitate dissemination of evidence-based practices, strategies must include efforts to make information about rigorous research readily available to the field.

This abstract was submitted to the 2017 Society for Prevention Research Annual Meeting.