About

BP-Net is building the Best Practices Library, a repository of tools and information that assist campuses to learn, share, adopt, and disseminate evidence-informed and evidence-based practices that support student mental health. Evidence-informed practices are identified through the new Best Practices Guide developed by BP-Net, which classifies practices intended to improve the mental health and wellbeing of post-secondary students through the best practices continuum (cutting-edge, emerging, promising, or best practice designations) and Indigenous-specific practices (Ways Tried and True practices designation) tracks.

The Best Practices Library is currently under development

Receiving a designation for your practice and being featured in the Best Practices Library allows you to:

• Receive national recognition for your practice
• Increase your practice’s credibility
• Showcase your innovation and evaluation successes with other institutions
• Receive feedback and suggestions from expert reviewers to improve your practice
• Collaborate with colleagues across the country who will adopt and evaluate your practice, providing an opportunity for the practice to progress along the continuum toward promising and best
• Contribute towards establishing best practices to support post-secondary student mental health.

With increased recognition of the importance of evaluation practices, quality improvement, and program accountability within the post-secondary sector over the last few years, the Guide seeks to support campuses by creating tools and a process to identify post-secondary student mental health practices and programs. The aim is to create a network that supports, encourages, and reinforces a culture of evaluation on campuses by building a library of tools and information that assist campuses to learn, share, adopt, and disseminate evidence-informed and evidence-based practices that support student mental health. The Guide allows campuses to identify programs that has positive mental health outcomes for students and encourages sharing of program evaluation tools and resources to support evaluation efforts. Throughout the Guide, the term “practices” is used to refer to, but is not limited to, programs, services, projects, strategies, frameworks, or other types of materials or resources that support post-secondary student mental health.

Upon completing an environmental scan of best practice frameworks employed within the health and mental health sectors, the Guide was developed by adopting and incorporating existing best practice frameworks in the health and mental health sector.  To contextualize the Guide within the Canadian post-secondary mental health sector, the National Standard of Canada for Mental-Health and Well-Being for Post-Secondary Students was utilized as an additional resource.