Literature Collection

A Workforce Crisis. Across the nation there is a high degree of concern about the state of the behavioral health workforce and pessimism about its future. Workforce problems have an impact on almost every aspect of prevention and treatment across all sectors of the diverse behavioral health field. The issues encompass difficulties in recruiting and retaining staff, the absence of career ladders for employees, marginal wages and benefits, limited access to relevant and effective training, the erosion of supervision, a vacuum with respect to future leaders, and financing systems that place enormous burdens on the workforce to meet high levels of demand with inadequate resources. Most critically, there are significant concerns about the capability of the workforce to provide quality care. The majority of the workforce is uninformed about and unengaged in health promotion and prevention activities. Too many in the workforce also lack familiarity with resilience- and recovery-oriented practices and are generally reluctant to engage children, youth, and adults, and their families, in collaborative relationships that involve shared decision-making about treatment options. It takes well over a decade for proven interventions to make their way into practice, since prevention and treatment services are driven more by tradition than by science. The workforce lacks the racial diversity of the populations it serves and is far too often insensitive to the needs of individuals, as these are affected by ethnicity, culture, and language. In large sections of rural America, there simply is no mental health or addictions workforce.There is overwhelming evidence that the behavioral health workforce is not equipped in skills or in numbers to respond adequately to the changing needs of the American population. While the incidence of co-occurring mental and addictive disorders among individuals has increased dramatically, most of the workforce lacks the array of skills needed to assess and treat persons with these co-occurring conditions.Training and education programs largely have ignored the need to alter their curricula to address this problem and, thus, the nation continues to prepare new members of the workforce who simply are underprepared from the moment they complete their training.

The HEALing (Helping to End Addiction Long-term) Communities Study (HCS) aims to test the effectiveness of the Communities That HEAL intervention in decreasing opioid overdose deaths in 67 communities across four U.S. states. This intervention enlists a collaborative team of researchers, academic experts, and community coalitions to select and implement interventions from a menu of evidence-based practices, including medications for opioid use disorder (MOUD). The HCS's New York team developed an integrated network systems (INS) approach with a mapping tool to coach coalitions in the selection of strategies to enhance medication treatment. With the INS approach, community coalitions develop a map of service delivery venues in their local county to better engage people with medication treatment wherever this need arises. The map is structured around core services that can provide maintenance MOUD and satellite services, which include all settings where people with opioid use disorder are encountered and can be identified, possibly given medication, and referred to core programs for ongoing MOUD care. This article describes the rationale for the INS mapping tool, with a discussion framed by the consolidated framework for implementation research, and provides a case example of its application.

OBJECTIVES: Telehealth treatment with medication for opioid use disorder (teleMOUD) was made possible with regulations following the COVID-19 pandemic that permitted prescribing buprenorphine without an in-person visit. This study evaluates the self-reported outcomes of patients treated by teleMOUD using the Brief Addiction Monitor (BAM), a 17-question tool that assesses drug use, cravings, physical and psychological health, and psychosocial factors to produce 3 subset scores: substance use, risk factors, and protective factors. METHODS: Patients treated by a teleMOUD provider group operating in >30 states were asked to complete an app-based version of BAM at enrollment and at 1 month. Patients who completed both assessments between June 2022 and March 2023 were included. RESULTS: A total of 2556 patients completed an enrollment BAM and 1447 completed both assessments. Mean number of days from baseline BAM to follow-up was 26.7 days. Changes were significantly different across most questions. The substance use subscale decreased from mean 2.6 to 0.8 (P < .001), the risk factors subscale decreased from mean 10.3 to 7.5 (P < .001), and the protective factors subscale increased from mean 14.3 to 15.0. (P < .001). Substance use and risk factor subscale changes were significant across all sex and age groups, while protective factors subscale did not improve for those <25 and >54 years. Patient reports of at least 1 day of illegal use or misuse decreased, including marijuana (28.1% vs 9.0%), cocaine/crack (3.9% vs 2.6%), and opioids (49.8% vs 10.5%). CONCLUSIONS: Among patients treated by teleMOUD who completed assessments at enrollment and 1 month, there was improvement in drug use, risk factor, and protective factor scores.