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Strengthening Service Coordination for Older Adults with Serious Mental Illness Expert Panel Report

by Chris Liu-Beers

NYAPRS Note: Attached please find the final report from the “Strengthening Service Coordination for Older Adults with Serious Mental Illness Expert Panel” that was recently held in Rockville on August 28, 2018 and convened by SAMHSA and their partners at the Administration for Community Living

Here’s a summary of findings from the Recommendations Facilitator Recap:

Understand and manage older adult behavioral health needs and use Connecticut’s behavioral health asset mapping study and methodology as a model. 

  1. Systems are fragmented and historically have not needed to work together. They have different goals in mind.  Like working in corrections whose goal is public safety and working in mental health whose goal is individual behavioral health wellness. There is a need to move towards a more integrated treatment system.

  2. The workforce is underdeveloped and inadequate, especially since 5 percent of SMI is late onset.

    1. Provide training and methodologies for reimbursement to fund service delivery, because it’s underfunded now.

    2. Develop specialists who are available across systems to address specific issues and, number three, use of peers and caregivers, development of peers and caregivers.

  3. Build peer and family expertise. 

  4. Build mental health screening into various systems. Identify a single way to assess across systems, use the same instrument, and let us all understand what that instrument means, all the workers and family members.

  5. Build technology and use more technology.

  6. Improve epidemiology about population strength.

  7. Move from a symptom/deficit system of describing individuals to a strengths-based system.

  8. Develop a co-occurring treatment system for older adults.

  9. Better expertise for prescribing practices for psychopharmacology.

  10. The expansion of federal funding.

  11. Review how things are funded under Medicare.

  12. Pay attention to the waiver programs; review funding opportunities and understand them better.

  13. Train peers in Illness Management and Recovery

  14. Advocate and educate for cultural intelligence.

  15. Support and fund evidence-based clinical interventions and community-based programs.