The Washington Council for Behavioral Health is excited to present the findings of a multi-year demonstration to develop the Behavioral Health Teaching Clinic Designation and Enhancement Rate. This effort, funded by a grant from the Ballmer Group, sought to formally identify and compensate licensed and certified community behavioral health agencies (BHAs) for their role training students and new graduates pursuing behavioral health careers across sectors and settings.
BHAs are the essential safety net providers for people with serious mental illness or substance use disorders. In addition to providing clinical services, they often serve as the training ground for the entire behavioral health workforce, as they provide the clinical supervision needed for students to complete internship requirements and for new graduates to obtain supervision hours required for independent clinical licensure. Although this role results in significant costs related to training and supervision when clinicians would otherwise be providing billable direct services to patients, the role is an unofficial and uncompensated one. As such, BHAs bear the cost for the essential training and supervision infrastructure that sustains this crucial workforce development pipeline. The Behavioral Health Teaching Clinic Designation and Enhancement Rate is an innovative solution to help increase and sustain the behavioral health workforce by recognizing and compensating our BHAs for training the broader behavioral health workforce in cutting-edge, critical treatment modalities. You can read more about the teaching clinic standards and rate methodology in our final report and one-page summary.
The Council is incredibly grateful to our partners at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing and CohnReznick, who provided subject matter expertise to inform the development of the Behavioral Health Teaching Clinic Designation and Enhancement Rate, as well as the six participating BHAs who were instrumental to the success of this work: Catholic Community Services of Western Washington; Columbia River Mental Health Services; Comprehensive Life Resources; Frontier Behavioral Health; Peninsula Behavioral Health; and Sunrise Services, Inc.
For more information about the costing model or other details related to the Teaching Clinic Designation and Enhancement Rate, please contact Joan Miller, CEO at jmiller@thewashingtoncouncil.org.