The surge in postsecondary students reporting mental health concerns, coupled with increased utilisation of on-campus and hospital-based mental healthcare, highlights a need to understand effective service navigation. To address this system gap, the University of Toronto and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) leveraged their unique expertise and resources to develop the University of Toronto Navigation (UTN) service. UTN introduces care navigators to facilitate postsecondary student transitions from acute mental health services to community or campus mental healthcare. There has been limited implementation and evaluation of navigator models specific to the postsecondary context to date, which hinders scalability. This paper describes the study protocol of Navigation to Enhance Post-Secondary Students’ Acute Mental Health Care Transitions, a study that aims to collaborate with students, navigators and clinicians to evaluate the UTN service.

A one-stage, single-arm multimethods study design will be used to evaluate the UTN service. We will recruit 103 students following their UTN intake appointment. Students will complete quantitative measures assessing health outcomes, experiences of care and service utilisation at baseline and at three subsequent time points across a 6-month follow-up period. The quantitative data will be linked to administrative healthcare data. The primary evaluation outcome will be defined as attending an appointment with an appropriate care provider (in person or virtually) within 30 days of discharge from the hospital. We will conduct interviews with students and referring clinicians to gather perspectives regarding their experiences and satisfaction with the UTN service in greater depth.

Research ethics board approvals have been obtained from the University of Toronto and CAMH. Results will be disseminated through publications and presentations, and a toolkit will be cocreated to support implementation and adaptation of hospital-based navigator interventions in postsecondary contexts.

To address the growing prevalence of sedentary behaviours among older adults and their associated adverse health outcomes, there is an urgent need to prioritise effective and accessible interventions. Mobile health (mHealth) delivers healthcare services and health-related information through portable electronic devices, enabling interventions to be administered directly in home settings. However, the evidence on the effectiveness of mHealth interventions in reducing sitting time among older adults remains inconsistent. To derive literature-based estimates of the effectiveness of mHealth interventions, we will systematically review and meta-analyse the impact of these interventions on sitting time in adults aged 55 years and older.

An electronic search of PubMed, Embase, Web of Science and Cochrane will be conducted from database inception to March 2025 to identify randomised controlled trials evaluating the effects of mHealth interventions on sitting time during waking hours, excluding sleep duration. Subgroup analyses will explore potential moderators (eg, participant characteristics, intervention specifics). Studies from all settings (eg, community, long-term care facilities, etc) will be considered. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines will be explicitly applied for structuring this report. Methodological quality will be assessed using the Cochrane Handbook tool. Two independent reviewers will screen the studies and extracted data, with methodological quality to be assessed using established criteria. Meta-analyses will be performed using Review Manager v.5.4 software.

This study uses secondary data and, therefore, does not require ethics approval. The findings will be communicated through presentations at international conferences and published in peer-reviewed journals. The results will inform the development of future mHealth interventions aimed at reducing sedentary behaviour in older adults and provide benchmarks for the effectiveness of technology-driven public health strategies. This protocol adheres to the PRISMA guidelines and follows the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions for methodological rigour.

CRD42023443926.