Practice Type: Community-Based Organizations

Discovering how a task-shifted Care Manager workforce of community health workers can address geriatric mental health

Older adults are less likely to receive the recommended standard of care for preventative services, chronic diseases and geriatric concerns such as complex care navigation. Late-life depression is a common chronic disease, and older adults face multiple barriers obtaining depression care from healthcare settings, especially if things like fragility, social needs, and transportation limit access to primary care. Offering depression care in non-traditional healthcare settings is one way to increase access. Community health workers (CHWs) are trusted community members who increase the health of communities through care coordination, health education and outreach. One approach is to task-shift the Care Manager (CM) role of a Collaborative Care framework to CHWs in the community. Global health work has demonstrated that non-clinicians can conduct low-intensity psychosocial interventions for depression. However, task-shifting the Care Manager role in a non-clinical setting requires additional skills and poses added challenges. We have gathered prior formative work among CHWs on what they think about being trained and supported in the skills of CM. We now seek to understand Collaborative Care stakeholders’ perspectives on this proposed role expansion of CHWs to CHW Care Managers (CHW-CMs) to understand how to design this role.

Behaviors and Executive Skills in T21 (BEST21)

We are conducting a study to understand the role of problem-solving in challenging behaviors for children with Down syndrome so that we can better understand the development of and treat these behaviors. If you agree to participate, this study will involve questionnaires, some of which may be completed at home. You would also attend an in-person visit that involves measuring your child’s naturally-occurring brain activity with EEG as well as cognitive assessments. We would schedule your visit around your schedule to the best of our ability and we can schedule this visit in a location that is convenient for you (UW, home visits, etc.). Participants will receive an $80 gift card to thank them for their time.

Partnering with patients to re-envision psychiatric hospitalization and discharge

We will analyze people’s stories about psychiatric hospitalization, interview people with experiences surrounding psychiatric hospitalization, and co-design with them to identify alternative approaches that would help people care for themselves as they transition out of the hospital. We will build upon our prior work on understanding patients’ challenges and co-designing new systems that help patients transition from psychiatric hospitalizationto self-management. In particular, we will focus on how we could redesign psychiatric hospital systems with the people who have experienced them, identifying patient insights on the knowledge, resources, and self-efficacy they need to help them return to the community.

Centering community voices in partnered mixed methods approaches to addressing health disparities with diverse communities

Meaningful partnerships between community and academic/public health co-researchers are needed to address community mental health, wellbeing, and health disparities. Partnerships should center the strengths, needs, and interests of communities on the communities’ terms while building relationships on trust and shared power.

UW researchers in partnership with the Community Health Board Coalition (CHBC) have developed an initial draft of a Community-Centered Approaches to Research and Evaluation (CCARE) Toolkit to guide academic, public health, and community researchers in partnering to act on emerging community data during times of crisis and beyond. As a part of this work, we are striving to better understand and support community health priorities.

Coach up the coaches: extending the reach of mental health professionals in sport settings

More than half of school-aged youth in the US play at least one organized sport, are similarly at-risk for mental health disorders as compared to their non-athlete peers, and face heightened barriers to seeking and sustaining mental health care. While coaches are not licensed mental healthcare providers, there is a robust evidence-base about laypeople (e.g., parents, teachers) effectively delivering brief interventions across population settings to help reduce psychological distress and increase the adoption of health behaviors. However, such brief interventions have not as-yet been adapted for the sport setting, or delivered by coaches.

The overarching goal of this project is to identify sport setting appropriate (very) brief interventions and adapt them for coach delivery in the sport setting. This will be accomplished by working in partnership with coaches, athletes, and licensed mental health care providers. We will use University of Washington’s First Approach Skills Training (FAST) training model (originally designed to train primary care clinicians in mental healthcare skills) to train a pilot cohort of coaches to deliver these interventions. This project is the starting point for a potentially transformative opportunity to extend the reach of mental healthcare professionals into the large and often underserved population of youth sport participants.

Implementing contingency management in a supportive housing context to promote resident well-being

Mental health and substance use disorders carry complex needs of living that are often poorly-served by our health systems, which result in immense societal costs. This has prompted federal recognition of supportive housing among the vital conditions that support the long-term recovery and resilience of our citizenry. Supportive housing offers safe living environs where residents access services such as harm reduction supplies and referral to recovery-oriented activities like peer support groups and workplace re-entry programs. To maximize the benefit that residents experience from such services, behavioral health staff working in supportive housing contexts should implement useful psychosocial therapies to spur greater service utilization by residents.

One such therapy that has proven useful among persons with mental health and substance use disorders is contingency management (CM), in which one earns tangible rewards for demonstrating desired behaviors like attending a support group, taking a prescribed medication or completing workplace re-entry paperwork. Given the robust and reliable therapeutic impacts of CM, there is much to be gained from its implementation in supportive housing environs. For several years, the project lead Dr. Hartzler and his team at the UW Center for Advancing Addiction Health Services (CAAHS) have provided comprehensive technical assistance to regional treatment settings to facilitate design and successful implementation of sustainable CM programming. Also, UW project collaborators Drs. Fockele and Leyde have built working relationships with Downtown Emergency Services Center (DESC) while exploring interest in CM among its staff and residents. This convergence of acute community need, an experienced team offering technical assistance and an established academic-community partnership highlights an opportunity in which CM will be implemented in DESC-governed supportive housing facilities to increase resident utilization of beneficial services.      

The Missouri Safety and Transportation (MOST) Study: Norms Documentation for Missouri Positive Community Norms Project

The team at the University of Washington (UW) will be working on this norms documentation project as “Phase One” of two separate contracts (the other to The Montana Institute (TMI)). At the request of ACT Missouri (with funding from the Missouri Department of Transportation), the UW team proposed survey items and collected data on both descriptive norms (actual behaviors) and injunctive norms (attitudes) related to seat belt use. In this pilot, data that were collected from young adults in Missouri will be used in a Positive Community Norms (PCN) campaign (developed and implemented by TMI during “Phase Two” of this project using the data collected in “Phase One”).

State Opioid Response/Tribal Opioid Response Technical Assistance

In conjunction with American Academy of Addiction Psychiatrists, this two-year grant extends regional contribution to an Opioid Response Network (ORN) by offering a range of technical assistance efforts in prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery in HHS Region 10 (AK, ID, OR, and WA states).