Behavioral Health Summit Focuses On Integrated Care for Mental Health, Substance Abuse

CCB MEDIA PHOTO Barnstable Police Officer Jeanne Challis, Elyse deGroot of Duffy Health Center, Cheryl Bartlett and Pat Durgin, both from Cape Cod Healthcare.

CCB MEDIA PHOTO
Barnstable Police Officer Jeanne Challis, Elyse DeGroot of Duffy Health Center, and Cheryl Bartlett and Pat Durgin, both from Cape Cod Healthcare.

HYANNIS – Integrated care in mental health and substance abuse services is a focus at this year’s Behavioral Health Summit.

The third annual summit, with the theme of Building Bridges To Recovery, is organized by the Behavioral Health Provider Coalition of Cape Cod and the Islands. The summit takes place Friday, October 2, from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the Resort and Conference Center at Hyannis.

Pat Durgin, program manager for the Partial Hospital Program for Cape Cod Healthcare and one of the organizers of the summit, said, “During this third summit, we really wanted to highlight the things we have accomplished here in the community so that everyone out there knows that we really have some very positive outcomes from the work we’re doing.”

Durgin said that people at the conference will hear about agencies and organizations moving forward together and working on shared challenges in the area of recovery. Individual problems can become the community’s problems, she said.

“Recovery happens differently for each person. We have people who suffer from a mental health diagnosis and also people who suffer from addiction. One of the things here on the Cape right now is we have people who suffer from both those problems. That often leads to poverty and an inability to function and it becomes therefore a community problem and not just a health problem. Recovery is part of a community process because it affects everyone from the businesses to the health care organizations to the police. We really want to look at recovery as a process and a journey that the community is on, not just the individual,” Durgin said.

Cheryl Bartlett, executive director of the Cape Cod Regional Substance Abuse Prevention Initiative at Cape Cod Healthcare, will be facilitating the summit’s afternoon panel about the integration of care.

“It’s really thinking about the whole person. We now segment care by body parts and disease, and particularly mental health and substance abuse disorders aren’t really even dealt within the primary care practice. That’s left to be done somewhere else. Models of care and healthcare reform have talked about integrating mental health and substance abuse into the primary care office. We’re going to have some models of promise that we share with people that are out there innovating and trying to figure out how we take care of the person holistically,” Bartlett said.

She said one of those models is already underway on Cape Cod as Gosnold on Cape Cod is now putting staffers in primary care doctor’s offices, as well as pediatric and ob/gyn offices.

“They screen the individuals and get a brief intervention right in the clinical setting,” she said.

Barnstable Police Officer Jeanne Challis, who works in the Community Impact Unit that works with the homeless population in Hyannis, will also be making a presentation at the conference.

“The substance use issue has definitely been on the rise,” Challis said. “The opiate problem is huge at this moment. There’s also a large increase in the number of people presenting with mental health problems. That’s across the board, not just with the homeless and the street community. That’s every call that we go on.”

Challis said that increase presents challenges for officers.

“We’re definitely seeing an increase in the number of people that are struggling with mental health problems and when you combine it with substance abuse issues it really presents a complex problem for a patrol officer responding to a scene on how to best handle that. Is that an appropriate situation for an arrest? Is that a situation where someone needs to go to the hospital? Is that something where treatment is the best option? So you really have to look at a multitude of options for the person every call you go on,” she said.

Listen below to hear about the Behavioral Health Summit from Cheryl Bartlett, executive director of the Cape Cod Regional Substance Abuse Prevention Initiative; Pat Durgin, program manager for the Partial Hospital Program for Cape Cod Healthcare and one of the organizers of the summit; and Barnstable Police Officer Jeanne Challis, who serves on the Community Impact Unit.

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