Organizational strategies to promote the sustainability and scale-up mental health innovations designed to promote youth psychological wellbeing

In Sweden, 15-25% of 11- to 15-year-olds report poor psychological wellbeing, including low life satisfaction and self-esteem.

Many young people lack hope and a positive outlook on the future and psychological wellbeing drops significantly and rapidly from age 11 to 15. During the 2000’s psychological wellbeing has decreased among both men and women aged 16-24.

Concern regarding the poor psychological wellbeing among young people is fueled by the fact that poor psychological wellbeing is often sustained into adulthood, is a risk factor for later poor health, and psychological adjustment.

One way to support the maintenance and development of psychological wellbeing in young people is through the provision of effective services in the community or in community-based settings.

However, in order to achieve wide-spread public health impact these efforts need to be sustained over time and scaled-up so as to improve reach.

Many such initiatives however are not maintained over time or remain only at the local level and are not scaled-up which hampers their ability to impact public health more widely.

The purpose of this systematic review is to examine the empirical literature on organizational strategies to promote the sustainability and/or scale-up of innovations designed to promote youth psychological wellbeing in the community or in community-based settings.

Our aim is to increase our scientific understanding of (1) the types of organizational initiatives that have been implemented in order to support the sustainability and/or scale-up of identified innovations, (2) organizational experiences with the identified initiatives, and (3) the evidence regarding the effectiveness of the initiatives.