Canada’s mental health system is “disjointed”, volunteer data analysts reveal service gaps

Volunteer data scientists and analysts used data from nine Canadian organizations to reveal geographic and demographic disparities in access to mental health services, referral patterns, and the impact of environmental factors on mental health and wellbeing. 

The three-week National Mental Health Datathon held in April 2025 drew in nearly 600 participants from major cities across Canada. Almost one year later, organizations that provided their data to participants are deepening their commitment to sharing information, improving data quality, and even developing a city-wide Community Information Exchange.  

The Converge Mental Health Coalition, composed of service providers and stakeholders, has committed to bringing together a new Community of Practice. Recently, the organization shared a new Information Sharing Framework to enable data-sharing in the mental health sector. 

“One of the challenges we have in the mental health sector is that data is associated with a lot of risk,” said Meaghon Reid, executive director of the Converge Mental Health Coalition. 

“Oftentimes, organizations get paralyzed, especially when they’re thinking about program data or service data that has personally identifiable information in it,” added Geoff Zakaib, director of Data for Good and the lead of the Calgary chapter. However, he added, data in the public domain, and data that has been aggregated and anonymized, has “immense value”. 

Converge and Data for Good collaborated to bring the national datathon to life, mobilizing volunteers across the country. Split into teams, volunteers were given access to anonymized and aggregated data from organizations including 211 Canada, Big Brothers Big Sisters Calgary, the Canadian Mental Health Association, and Helpseeker Technologies. 

“For us, the datathon was a big shift in how we approach our data,” said Drashti Zaveri, evaluation specialist at Big Brothers Big Sisters Calgary. From primarily using data to report to funders, Zaveri and others on the team have now been able to reflect on the quality of their own programs and services using outcomes data. 

Frontline orgs have data but lack analytical capacity 

Both Reid and Zakaib said that frontline mental health service providers are often sitting on a wealth of information, collecting it in real-time as clients call in and are referred to other services. What they struggle with is the capacity to analyze that information, or overlay it with additional and external datasets. 

Volunteers helped to uncover trends in the data, such as referral types and volumes, volunteer retention rates, and times when services were most likely to be used. Some teams layered organizational data with external sources, while others combined data from multiple sources to produce a more in-depth picture of the mental health landscape. 

Some teams also used predictive modelling and machine learning to forecast service gaps and allocate resources appropriately, which could support organizations in forward planning. 

211 Canada has been aggregating data from call reports to identify top needs and unmet demand. During the Covid-19 pandemic, analysis showed a high number of calls related to financial assistance, particularly the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) program, said Judy Shum, vice president of community impact and 211 Canada at United Way Centraide. 

@futureofgood New Canadian mental health data is being put to work. #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #nonprofitsoftiktok #mentalhealthmatters #greenscreen ♬ original sound – Future of Good

At the moment, most of the unmet needs that 211 navigators are recording are to do with financial assistance and housing, she added. One of the topics they wanted to explore further with volunteers at the datathon was the correlation between mental health and environmental events. 

Later this year, 211 Canada is aiming to launch a national dashboard containing aggregated data about trends they are observing from calls. 

Zaveri and the team at Big Brothers Big Sisters Calgary have a much more manual data collection process. Prospective mentees, and volunteers complete pre-screening surveys followed by a matching process. Additional interviews are then conducted after a successful match between a volunteer and client. 

After sharing 10 to 15 years of historic data with the datathon volunteers, the analysts quickly found inconsistencies in the way that the data had been recorded. That led to Big Brothers Big Sisters Calgary integrating a data quality check process. 

Since the datathon, Zaveri has also been using more complex data analysis and visualization tools like SQL and PowerBI, asking deeper questions of the data beyond the capacity of a simple Excel spreadsheet. Now, for example, she can track how many initial inquiries turned into matches, as well as where potential clients or volunteers drop out of the process 

The datathon also allowed Big Brothers Big Sisters Calgary to explore data-sharing – once considered a risk – in a safe, contained and confidential environment, Zaveri said. “It shifted our mindset to seeing how […] more opportunity can come once we have datasets [that are] ready, clean and structured.”

Experiments and pilots

According to a summary report about the datathon, final projects varied from data analysis and visualization, to chatbots, sentiment analysis and referral tools. 

“As a strategic proof of concept, the Datathon created a rare space where cross-sector partners could safely test the mechanics of data sharing,” the report said. Zakaib recognized that different types of organizations also had different levels of comfort with data-sharing: researchers were more likely to be comfortable with it, while frontline service organizations were not as used to sharing data externally. 

Distress Centre Calgary is currently trying to break down that barrier by piloting a Community Information Exchange, said Richard Mugford, director of community information and data systems. 

First launched in San Diego, and later adopted in other U.S. cities, , a Community Information Exchange allowed health, welfare and social services organizations to coordinate on an individual’s care.  

Along with its partners, Distress Centre Calgary plans to share more about its pilot in early 2026.

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