The fields of psychiatry, social work, health care and other similar backgrounds are always trying to find the best types of care for patients. An emerging style that some of these professions are implementing is the “integrated care model.” This model is the cost-effective and patient-centered care a client receives as a result of a team that includes primary care and behavioral health clinicians working together instead of as separate entities.
To learn more about this model, the Department of Social Work’s spring symposium Wednesday centered on the theme of integrated behavioral health care. Jodi Hall, the director of social work and one of the head planners of this event, extended the invitation past NC State to encourage participants to work collaboratively and to have a better understanding of this care.
With more than 200 attendees at the symposium, the event included people from an array of backgrounds. Hall said there were not only NC State social work students and staff, but also students and faculty from other North Carolina universities as well as a variety of professionals including county health directors, business owners, physicians, nurses, therapists and more.
The motivation behind setting the symposium’s theme as integrated behavioral health care was from a federal grant the Department of Social Work received two years ago from the Health Resources and Services Administration, according to Hall. The purpose of the grant is to increase the number of social work clinicians who provide integrated care to clients who are age 16–25 and are at risk of developing, or have been diagnosed with, a mental illness or substance abuse disorder.
“As a grant recipient, we committed to bringing models of integrated behavioral health care to the community in order to improve medical outcomes for those currently not receiving care or receiving fragmented care,” Hall said. “This symposium provided an opportunity to engage students, medical providers, community members and researchers in one room.”
Sharon Dempsey, the founder and owner of Integrated Behavioral Health Solutions in Greensboro, was the keynote speaker of the symposium. Dempsey has six years of experience specifically working in the style of integrated care for individual and family patients.
“What integrated behavioral health care is, in essence, is a one-stop shop to support individuals with both mental and physical health needs,” Dempsey said. “It is very efficient compared to traditional models. It’s time-efficient, cost-effective and most of all, it’s relational. It’s about the relationship [a practitioner] has with an individual, which ultimately gets that individual to ‘buy in’ what you’re ‘selling.’”
During Dempsey’s opening speech, she explained the impacts integrative health care has. For instance, in a “traditional health care model,” the physicians, mental health clinicians, practitioners, etc. work separately, usually not collaborating on paperwork, strategies and observations.
With integrative health care, these three institutions work and collaborate together. The client does not have to go to three different places, fill out three different sets of paperwork and talk to three different sets of staff; integrative care is all under one umbrella, according to Dempsey.
Yasmeen Hardy, a graduate student studying social work, said she enjoyed learning about a different therapy model. In the field of social work, the integrative behavioral model is not well known and practiced, according to Hardy, so it was an interesting topic to learn about.
“I feel like every social worker has once thought, ‘what if psychiatrists, nurses, doctors and everyone collaborated into one agency to help a client to make it easier,’ and that’s what this training is about today,” Hardy said. “I really feel like this is something that should be spread, and this is something I am very interested in learning more about.”
After Dempsey’s speech, the symposium continued with two shifts of breakout sessions that included five different talks. Each talk was about the integrative health care model but with different populations including children, adolescents, people with substance or alcohol abuse, older adults and children in foster care, and a different expert in the field of integrative health spoke.
Followed by the two sessions was a panel of experts who use the integrative care model in their work. The fields of the presenters included pediatrician, medical director, professor and social worker, amongst others, and they all work throughout Raleigh and beyond to Johnston County.
Hall said the department chose these presenters because they understand and recognize “the important interdisciplinary collaboration in order to produce improved patient outcomes.”
“We selected presenters and panelist that are positively impacting the community,” Hall said. “Once we selected our keynote speaker, Sharon Dempsey, we built around her expertise of successful integrated behavioral health models.”
Both Hall and Dempsey said it is important for social work students, as well as others in the community, to learn about integrated behavioral health care, and the symposium was a great avenue for that.
“As researchers continue to show the benefit of integrated care for patients, insurance companies and policy makers are beginning to move toward recognizing the value of integrated models of care,” Hall said. “Social workers tend to be on the frontlines of care, particularly for poor, marginalized and vulnerable groups. We want our students to be on the cutting edge of understanding and using research-informed models of care.”
The topic of the Department of Social Work’s spring symposium yesterday was integrated behavioral health care. One part of the symposium event was the panel discussion by experts in the field of integrated care, who were from both Wake and Johnston counties. The panel featured Marilyn Pearson, Avis Dublin, Gwendolyn K. Newsome, Evelyn Sanders, Laura McDaniel and Jason Lane, with Sharon Dempsey , the event's keynote speaker, moderating.
