In a unique collaboration between federal agencies, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is contracting with the UW AIMS Center to provide training and technical assistance to 11 clinics receiving Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) funding to implement collaborative care in nurse-led primary care settings. The 11 HRSA Awardee clinics are all safety-net clinics located in rural, suburban, and urban areas across the US and together they serve over 250,000 patients annually. Most are affiliated with university training programs. NIMH funding is to ensure that awardees implement the Collaborative Care Model with fidelity, and aligns with NIMH strategic goals to strengthen the public health impact of evidence-based integration practices.

HRSA has had a long history of providing grants to clinics run by Advance Practice Nurses, and one of their granting streams recently decided to add behavioral health integration as a requirement of receiving funding, specifically the use of collaborative care.

This past November, the UW AIMS Center brought together teams from each of the awardee sites for a two-day, in-person interactive training session in Seattle. Anna Ratzliff, MD, PhD, and Rita Haverkamp, MSN, PMHCNS-BC trained awardees in the fundamentals of collaborative care, and each site team developed their own individual work plan to kick off their projects. They also shared with each other the unique challenges around bringing integrated behavioral health care to their diverse communities. Staff and faculty at UW AIMS will continue to provide ongoing implementation support and clinical coaching through Zoom meetings with individual sites and small clinician groups.