Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families reference group meetings

Veterans of the Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP, as well as their families, can experience a range of mental health challenges. When the Atlas Institute for Veterans and Families was established to help address those challenges, they called on Ascribe to capture input from those most affected and translate it into useable reports to inform their action plans.

How Ascribe helped

Veteran mental health is affected by circumstances and complexities that are not always well understood by civilian populations — including health service providers. At the same time, their families experience their own challenges that are not adequately addressed by civilian healthcare systems and not covered by the resources available to veterans. The Atlas Institute was formed to bridge these gaps, with a focus on hearing directly from veterans and their families.

To do that, the Atlas Institute set up reference groups made up of veterans, family members of veterans, service providers who treat veterans and researchers who study veteran mental health. These groups meet regularly to provide input on the future direction of the Atlas Institute: research topics to cover, resources to develop and advocacy work to do. Ascribe was brought on board from the organization’s inception to attend the quarterly reference group meetings and take detailed notes on all presentations, brainstorming sessions and discussions. From these notes, we produced summary reports that went beyond the basic minutes typically generated by AI note-taking apps. Using our judgment, we were able to synthesize and tease out the most important points to inform the Atlas Institute’s planning, delivering genuinely useful documents.

Following the first set of meetings, we created a report template that enabled us to succinctly present the key points from each discussion, including an at-a-glance view of the similarities and differences in the various groups’ responses to key questions. With our template streamlining the writing and review process, we developed more than 10 summary reports over four years.

In response to the positive reception of these reports, our team was invited to cover several other Atlas Institute events, including a series of workshops for an online treatment decision aid tool, a panel discussion on veteran and family engagement in research, and several meetings of the Peer Support Community Network. Each report provided an overview of the conversations and highlighted key takeaways or action items. In addition to the summary reports, we also delivered our raw capture notes for some events to provide a full picture of the discussions.

Deliverable: Meeting Summary Reports

Our process:

• Live notetaking of group discussions and presentations
• Report template (first meeting cycle only)
• Content outline (when necessary)
• Report writing and revisions