On Wednesday, I will be giving a talk sponsored by the Massachusetts Behavioral Health Partnership on the role of the the Primary Care physician in the new and improved Children's Behavioral Health Initiative, which makes its big debut on July 1. Preparing the talk has been interesting; I'm not part of the planning team, but I have been trying to pay pretty close attention to the process and to understand the various pieces of the puzzle. The folks from MassHealth are very interested in the details of the program; I am much more interested in the details of my patients and we are both very interested in not saying anything that is factually incorrect or that will either get people's hopes up too much. This new system is going to take a while to shake down and folks have to be ready for that. Anyway, putting the talk together has crystalized a few thoughts in my thinking on the impact of the Rosie D. case:
- The plan for the system is designed to address many of the concerns we have had in the management of children and adolescents with serious emotional disturbances as community-based care has replaced psychiatric hospitals as the standard of care.
- We are making a massive change in a really complicated system. We can predict a few of the places where it is likely to get messy, like identification, communication, coordination, and appropriate level of service
- The new systems will provide better service, but they will be new. Like a new car, it will take us a while to get used to the configuration of the controls.
- The most important thing we can do in the process is listen to the patients. That will keep us on track.
I took stuff from a lot of different sources- we will see how it goes. (Only cartoon in the talk is given below) Hope to see you at one of them.
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