Products and Resources Catalog

Download the slides. This presentation provides an orientation to Z-codes and how they are utilized in primary care settings to improve care. You will:​ Learn what Z-codes are​ Learn how Z-codes are predictive of health status​ Learn to utilize Z-codes to track, report, and make referrals to address social determinants of health   Watch corresponding presentation Food Insecurity  Learn more about Context Clues: Using Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) to Enhance Treatment

Objectives: - examine the negative mental health consequences for healthcare workers of COVID and in general/intro to the idea that resilience can be increased/prior evidence that brief resilience-enhancing interventions can improve outcomes in healthcare workers. -explore specific interventions to build resilience incorporating such skills as mindfulness and self-compassion. Finally, we will examine different modalities in which these interventions are offered such as via zoom, in-person, and pre-recorded video sessions.   To watch the recording, click here. Slides coming soon!   Other resources shared: https://www.resilienceandprevention.com/healthcare-providers  https://www.resilienceandprevention.com/exercises

In this presentation, Mid-America MHTTC provides a rationale to address Social Determinants of Health in primary care settings. The presentation provides a broad overview of the topic and serves as introduction to future presentations of specific conditions by which people live, work and age. In particular, participants of this presentation will: Define social determinants of health, health equity and health disparities Describe the impact of social determinants on health outcomes Understand the importance of assessing for common social determinants of health in primary care settings Identify actionable steps to screen and refer to community supports for social determinants of health Learn more about Context Clues: Using Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) to Enhance Treatment.

In this presentation, Mid-America MHTTC provides a rationale to address Social Determinants of Health in primary care settings. The presentation provides a broad overview of the topic and serves as introduction to future presentations of specific conditions by which people live, work and age. In particular, participants of this presentation will: Define social determinants of health, health equity and health disparities Describe the impact of social determinants on health outcomes Understand the importance of assessing for common social determinants of health in primary care settings Identify actionable steps to screen and refer to community supports for social determinants of health Learn more about Context Clues: Using Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) to Enhance Treatment.

This webinar is focused on steps behavioral health employers can take to support the well-being of their employees, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first of a two-part series, this webinar will feature speakers who will share their lessons learned as behavioral health agencies supporting employee well-being through the pandemic and beyond. For over a year, the behavioral health workforce has worked harder and longer, often putting their physical and mental health and well-being on the line. This group – like so many others – has faced unprecedented demands, including but not limited to rapidly shifting to telehealth and/or figuring out safe ways to offer in-person services; grieving the loss of colleagues, clients, friends, and family; balancing decreases in funding with the increased need to support wellbeing for colleagues and clients alike; and more. Now, after more than a year of working during the global pandemic, providers are experiencing high levels of stress, vicarious trauma, emotional exhaustion, and compassion fatigue. This added burden puts them at risk for stress-related medical problems, mental conditions, and substance use, as well as increased risk for leaving their profession altogether. In this context, it is critical that employers adopt organizational strategies and practices to support employee well-being. The Quadruple Aim is a framework that adds “improving the work-life of providers and staff” to the goals of improving population health, enhancing the patient experience, and reducing costs. In this webinar, there will be a discussion of creative interventions to support the provider-oriented aim in this unprecedented time, with implications for wellness now and in the future.   To watch the recording click here.   Presenter(s): Allison Ponce and Kyle Pedersen are Co-Chief Wellness Officers for Connecticut Mental Health Center, a public mental health center run jointly by the State of Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services and the Yale Department of Psychiatry.    Allison Ponce, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor in the Yale Department of Psychiatry. She earned her Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Connecticut. She is the Director of Education at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. Dr. Ponce has research, administrative, and clinical interests in public mental health, particularly with regard to serious mental illness and homelessness. Another major area of focus is the education and training of psychologists and other mental health professionals. Dr. Ponce supervises and advises psychology fellows and coordinates several seminars focused on administration, leadership, and community-based care. Dr. Ponce is Chair of the American Psychological Association's Policy and Planning Board and Past-Chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers.   Kyle Pedersen, M.A.R., has worked for Connecticut Mental Health Center since 2002, is currently Director of the CMHC Foundation, and has more than 20 years of experience in community mental health and non-profit leadership in New Haven and New York City. In the Department of Psychiatry, he co-chairs the Project Synapse workplace improvement initiative and the Staff Sub-committee of the Anti-Racism Task Force. Kyle is skilled in executive leadership; strategic planning; new program development; sound fiscal management; donor relations and fund development; community connections; supervision of staff, volunteers, and interns; and training and education for students and learners of all ages. He is an anti-racist trainer/organizer with the Elm City-Undoing Racism Organizing Collective and People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond; deacon for Trinity Episcopal Church and the Episcopal Church at Yale; treasurer of Gather New Haven; on the boards of Beulah Land Development Corporation and Citywide Youth Coalition; and has served on boards of other local and regional organizations. Kyle enjoys cooking, gardening, reading, and messing around in small boats.

Organizational well-being is often misunderstood as “self-care.” The COVID-19 pandemic has affected organizations and employees in myriad ways, prompting a renewed focus on the need for organizational structures, policies, and practices to support employee well-being. In particular, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) employees have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, while also experiencing the impact of racial inequities in the workplace and larger society.   The New England Mental Health Technology Transfer Center has created this collection of resources to offer information, strategies, and practices to help behavioral health employers take steps to “fix the workplace” rather than “fixing the worker.” It is divided into four sections:   Understanding the Impact of COVID-19 on Workers and Organizations (p. 2) Organizational Strategies and Practices for Supporting Employee Well-Being in the Workplace (p. 5) Organizational Strategies and Practices for Supporting Employee Well-being: Resources Specific to Behavioral Health Organizations (p. 8) Organizational Strategies and Practices for Supporting Employee Well-being: Frameworks and Lessons Learned from Healthcare Settings (p. 12)     Are there resources you would like to see added to this list? Please let us know what information and resources your organization needs to better support employee well-being by emailing us at: [email protected].

In this hour we discussed what principals need to do for their schools right now to address the trauma of the last year and looking ahead. We focused on the preparation, planning, and practice needed to ensure teachers and principals are better prepared to address and advocate for the social-emotional and mental health needs of everyone in the school community. We started the healing by decoding what we've learned about the power and drawbacks of remote learning, the resources needed to improve school leadership, and how to mitigate the impact of the past year with appropriate social-emotional and mental health supports. We looked at how school staff at the Pre-K-12 grade levels can embed interventions to prioritize mental health support. And most importantly, how this prioritization might impact educational and leadership preparation programs.   To watch the recording, click here.    Facilitator: Martha Staehli, PhD, Director, New England MHTTC, School Mental Health Initiative, Instructor, Yale School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry Featured Speakers: Jill Flanders, Consultant, Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care Kathleen Sciarappa, EdD, Board of Directors, International Mentoring Association Member, New England MHTTC Advisory Team

On February 11th, we held a virtual convening on Supporting the Mental Health of BIPOC Community College Students where stakeholders from all 6 states discussed challenges, shared promising practices, and identified opportunities to improve services and supports for BIPOC students.   During the convening, Dr. Justin Heinze presented data from recent Healthy Minds Study survey respondents, including rates of depression, anxiety, and service access in college students. In addition to increases in poorer mental health across a variety of indicators, the responses also illuminate differences by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation, as well as those attending community colleges versus four-year institutions. To watch the recording, click here.    Dr. Heinze is an educational psychologist and Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. His research investigates how schools influence disparities in violence and other risk outcomes from an ecological perspective that includes individual, interpersonal, and contextual influences on development. He is particularly interested in structural features of school context and policy that perpetuate inequity in violence and firearm outcomes, but also how these institutions can serve as a setting for intervention.

About this Resource:  The first episode of psychosis is a crucial time to intervene and potentially change the trajectory of a schizophrenia-spectrum illness. With the number of coordinated specialty care (CSC) teams expanding rapidly across the US, there are more services available for people with first episode psychosis than ever before. Dr. Robert Cotes provides an update on the phenomenology, services, and treatments available for people with first episode psychosis as well as lessons learned from the perspective of someone who has worked on a CSC team.      About the Presenter:  Robert O. Cotes, MD, is an Associate Professor at Emory University School of Medicine in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He attended West Virginia University School of Medicine then completed his psychiatry residency at Dartmouth. He serves as Co-Director of the PSTAR Clinic (Persistent Symptoms: Treatment, Assessment, and Recovery), Director of Project ARROW (Achieving Recovery through Resilience, Optimism, and Wellness), and Co-Director of Open Dialogue Atlanta at Grady's Outpatient Behavioral Health Clinic. His research focuses on clozapine, cardiometabolic side effects of antipsychotic medications, digital biomarkers, and first episode psychosis. Dr. Cotes is the principal investigator for multiple clinical trials focused on treatment options for psychosis. Dr. Cotes serves as a Psychiatrist Expert for the American Psychiatric Association's SMI Adviser initiative.

Presentation Slides Description: This webinar highlighted the importance of sustaining the school mental health workforce for achieving the goals of an effective, high-quality school mental health services system.  Dr. Mark Weist and Dr. Janet Cummings discussed recruitment and retention approaches that community mental health providers and local education agencies may want to consider implementing to support these goals, the current evidence concerning these approaches, and key resources to inform implementation efforts.   Learning Objectives: Understand the essential roles of workforce in achieving high-quality school mental health services systems Describe potential approaches to improve recruitment and retention of the school mental health workforce Discuss the evidence about best practices in recruiting and retaining school mental health providers Identify key resources on developing the school mental health workforce  

This session featured a conversation about advocating for changes in the societal conditions and oppressive structures that impact mental health, which is a cornerstone of the citizenship framework. The panel featured community activists and people in recovery sharing their own experiences with advocating for change through collective efforts, and what impact that work outside the system has had on their lives and recovery journeys.

This is a supplement to the report, Learning Collaboratives: A Strategy for Quality Improvement & Implementation in Behavioral Health, which reviews the research base and provides results of a series of key informant interviews on learning collaboratives and their potential use in quality improvement and implementation. This supplement to the full report identifies resources that are available to assist technical assistance providers in developing and offering learning collaboratives. It contains links to the following categories of information: Institute for Healthcare Improvement Resources Guides to Conducing and Planning Collaboratives Implementation and Change Strategies Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Resources Framework for Selecting an Improvement Strategy Reporting on Learning Collaboratives Health Equity, Diversion, and Inclusion Resources Additional Recommended Readings

Learning Collaboratives: A Strategy for Quality Improvement & Implementation in Behavioral Health In 1995, The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) launched its Breakthrough Series (BTS) collaboratives to improve healthcare. These are often referred to as learning collaboratives. Key elements of these BTS learning collaboratives, as identified by IHI in its early publications, included: selecting a specific improvement topic, recruiting expert faculty, enrolling organizations and teams, face-to-face learning sessions, Plan-Do-Study-Act cycles of change, technical assistance to teams, inter-agency sharing and learning, and summation of results and lessons learned. The IHI model was widely disseminated and adopted nationally and internationally. To educate technical assistance providers about learning collaboratives and their potential use in quality improvement and implementation, the MHTTC Network Coordinating Office commissioned a review. Conducted by the Annapolis Coalition on the Behavioral Health Workforce, it addresses these questions: what are learning collaboratives; what is the evidence for their effectiveness; what are their key elements; how have they been applied in behavioral health; and what are best practices for use in behavioral health? The review concludes with a summary of key findings and a set of recommendations for technical assistance providers. For the accompanying Resources document, see Resources on Planning and Conducting Learning Collaboratives. For more information on this initiative, see our Workforce Development Training webpage.

Drs. Kenneth Ruggiero and Margaret Anton describe strategies to address COVID-related and other barriers to care and demonstrate an iPad-based toolkit that houses a collection of games and activities clinicians can use to improve quality of care in Trauma-Focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT). By the end of the webinar, participants are able to: Describe the benefits of telehealth based platforms Recognize the limitations of telehealth platforms Understand the potential benefits of protocol-driven games and activities in the context of child mental health treatment Describe the state of the science relative to telehealth and technology-based solutions Understand how to better serve patients while we struggle with COVID-19

On 6/24, Yuhua Bao and Lisa Dixon led this webinar. Sustained implementation of Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC) calls for innovative payment models that reflect local preferences and circumstances. Funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, our research team are working to develop a tool to support decision-making by payers and providers of CSC to design a bundled payment. During the EPLC discussion, we will conduct a demonstration of the interactive tool and seek feedback from the audience on its utility and ways to improve the tool.   to access a copy of the presentation, click here. 

Links to these websites are for informational and educational purposes only. If you need legal advice, please consult a legal professional. These websites do not necessarily represent the opinions of the New England Mental Health Technology Transfer Center or the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health.

  This document was created to use when developing policies that support advance directives in recovery-oriented systems.   

This document was created to help assess and implement policies in systems.  

On April 30th, Dr. Jason Lang described Connecticut’s approach to scaling outpatient and school-based EBTs over the past 12 years, including implementation strategies, outcomes, and lessons learned. After watching this webinar, Participants should be able to:   1. describe implementation strategies for and approaches to disseminating EBTs for children with mental health needs. 2. describe the benefits, including child-level outcomes, of disseminating EBTs across a statewide system. 3. describe implementation, policy, and resource challenges of EBT dissemination at the state and provider levels along with strategies to address these concerns.   To download the slides, click here. 

This brief report begins with an overview of mental health workforce challenges in the region. It then offers strategies for workforce recruitment and retention, as well as shares Region IV resources for mental health professionals.

The next frontier of peer support services started quickly. The rapid deployment of digital media tools to provide peer support services has created a new set of ongoing technical hurdles, but when people do get past those, what do they find? This webinar will focus not on the technical how to of online peer support, but how to provide meaningful support and keep people connected within that digital space. We will explore how to move traditional in-person activities to online activities, including how to adapt, and when adaptation is not practical or possible. Participants will also learn how to use traditional and social media to engage and expand peer participation in online wellness and support activities. By the end of the webinar, participants will be able to: Schedule diverse and meaningful support and wellness activities for peers Identify online wellness and support activities that can replace traditional activities Transition traditional peer engagement to online engagement Maintain existing relationships with peers Build new relationships with peers

On February 4th, a webinar led by Jeff Donald, Mindfulness Coordinator, Montgomery County Public Schools—the largest school district in Maryland—focused on the county's intentional turn to infusing mindfulness and implementing trauma-informed school based mental health programs. Jeff shared how within a short period of time his yoga/meditation practices have expanded from serving one school to requests for services for over 50% of Montgomery County Schools. He also described the program he is spearheading to train teachers to implement yoga/meditation in classrooms, as well as the impact on students. Attendees experienced guided meditations and learn pointers for implementation of yoga and mindfulness practices, with a focus on secondary schools. To download the slides, click here. 

On November 14th, Larry Davidson, NE-MHTTC director, led a webinar that discussed the principles of recovery-oriented systems of care. He also talked about a resource called "Recovery-Oriented Systems of Care (ROSC) Resource Guide" which can be downloaded through the download button. Resources: ROSC Guide

On November 7th, Dr. Kimberly Noble, Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, led a discussion that focused on various interventions aimed at mitigating the effects of poverty, including school-based interventions, parenting interventions, and, notably, direct anti-poverty interventions. To download the slides, click here.