2009 is a critical year. Promised economic recovery and healthcare reform legislation are opportunities for meaningful financial commitments to mental health and addictions services and mental healthcare organizations are offering a practical actionable agenda:
- The integration of primary care services in behavioral health settings:
The Healthcare Collaborative Project brings together behavioral health and primary care organizations offering a bi-directional approach for care. The need for behavioral health services in primary care is widely accepted. But the integration of primary care services in behavioral health settings remains controversial despite the fact that individuals with serious mental illness appear to have the worst mortality rates in the public health system. Therefore, mental healthcare organizations are actively pursuing single points of accountability to enhance continuity of care for this underserved population.
- Cost-based-plus financing that supports service excellence:
People want and deserve quality services but quality services depend on skilled staff. Low salaries have created – and are perpetuating – a recruitment, retention, and quality crisis for behavioral healthcare. We need a workforce of skilled staff delivering nationally recognized practices within organizations that live by the rule “If you don?t measure it, you can?t improve it. “For mental healthcare organizations, healthcare reform is an opportunity to bring “parity” to public mental health services by ending the second class status of community mental health and addiction providers in America?s safety net.
