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Meeting the Workforce Challenge at Outreach
As behavioral health care providers confront the unrelenting opioid epidemic, in an environment of rapidly evolving reforms in health delivery and payment systems, one theme continues to resonate: the importance of a vital workforce. It comes as no surprise that compounding the reality of systems...
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The Experience of Workplace Stress and Compassion Satisfaction of Licensed Social Workers
Employed in fast-paced, often poorly funded agencies and working with clients who have experienced significant traumas, many licensed social workers are believed to experience a high degree of stress. At the same time, many feel emotionally fulfilled by their work and experience “compassion...
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The Behavioral Health Workforce Crisis: Past, Present, and Future
First on the list of topics for this issue of Behavioral Health News was “The Workforce Crisis Today.” That’s interesting because the workforce “crisis” is anything but new. For example, when I first entered this field during the height of deinstitutionalization in New York—the early...
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Self-Care is Essential to Well-being at Work
By now, “self-care” and “workplace wellness” aren’t novel concepts. It would be difficult not to find myriad references to both in the popular and professional press. Many organizations, including in the private sector, healthcare and government have embraced employee wellness programs,...
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Staff Development at the Mental Health Association of Westchester
In recent editions of Behavioral Health News, we have written of sweeping transformations in services offered at The Mental Health Association of Westchester (MHA). These transformations require critical staff development - learning new skills and new processes of working. To manage these changes,...
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Rural Workforce Development: Critical Challenges
The critical challenges that are associated with rural workforce development remain a significant issue in America. We have an obligation to explore the best ways of caring for the underserved rural population. Currently we have a health professions crisis unfolding. The federal government projects...
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Primary Care Integration: Alternative Workforce Strategies for Community-Based Behavioral Health Service Organizations in the Era of Physician Shortages
It has been many years since the surgeon general report declared that vastly poor health outcomes for persons suffering from behavioral health disorders was a public health crisis. Lives filled with long term disability and early mortality caused, in part, by service fragmentation within the U.S....
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BHN Summer 2019 Issue
"The Behavioral Health Workforce" Articles in This...
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System Change and Service Providers: Opportunities and Challenges in Addressing Unmet Needs
In 2011, a priority of New York’s Governor Andrew M. Cuomo was Medicaid redesign, with the substantive presence of behavioral health services in both the Medicaid Redesign Team (MRT) and the subsequent Delivery System Reform Incentive Program (DSRIP). The focus was to reduce inpatient...
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Will “System Transformation” Transform the System? Before We Celebrate: 20 Questions That Need Answers
System transformation is underway in New York State and throughout the United States through the development of elaborate financial structures such as accountable care organizations and health homes. No doubt these new structures will change the way business is done in the mental health system. But...
