Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Feb 6, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 11, 2019 - Mar 2, 2019
Date Accepted: Jun 5, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Evaluation of eMentalHealth.ca, a Canadian Mental Health Website Portal: Mixed Methods Assessment
Background:
Many Canadians have mental health needs, and it can be challenging not knowing where to go for mental health information, services, and support. The website eMentalHealth.ca was created to facilitate and assist Canadians to (1) learn about mental health, (2) screen for common mental health issues, and (3) find mental health services and support.
Objective:
The aim of this study was to use multiple methods to learn about visitors of eMentalHealth.ca, their perceptions, and their satisfaction with the website.
Methods:
Website analytics (Google Analytics) provided information about the number of unique visits to the website and how the site was used. Web-based self-administered surveys were used to gather additional information on users’ characteristics and to assess their perception of the website and satisfaction with the website.
Results:
Web analytic results showed that from January 1 to December 31, 2017, there were 651,107 users, with 1.97 million page views. Users were more often female than male, and the majority of users were aged 35 years and older. Most users were located in Canada (612,806/651,107, 94.12%), and the most common city of origin of users was Toronto (101,473/651,107, 15.58%), followed by Ottawa (76,692/651,107, 11.78%), and Montreal (26,621/651,107, 4.09%). Web-based surveys were completed by a total of 370 respondents from June to December 2017. Overall, the majority of users were satisfied with the website (93.0%, 320 out of 344 responses). Positive feedback was related to the content of the website as a helpful resource, and negative feedback was related to technical difficulties as well as the design of the main page. This analysis will be used to help the team with ongoing improvements to the website, for example, improving technical issues and homepage usability.
Conclusions:
Most visitors reported satisfaction with their use of eMentalHealth.ca to learn about mental health as well as where to find help. Mental health websites such as eMentalHealth.ca are a low-cost way to increase public awareness about mental health.
Citation
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Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.