The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has announced the 10 winners of its Behavioral Health Equity Challenge. SAMHSA said the winners of the challenge presented exciting approaches to effective outreach and engagement with underserved individuals in order to foster behavioral health equity throughout the country.
The Behavioral Health Equity Challenge sought to identify and highlight outreach and engagement strategies that increase access to behavioral health services for racial and ethnic underserved communities. In addition to strategies that address mental health, SAMHSA recognized the work of organizations working in substance abuse prevention and treatment.
Camden Coalition in New Jersey is one of 10 awardees chosen among 427 submissions and one of four winners in the category of “strategies that address mental health.”
Launched in the spring of 2021, the Camden Coalition’s Pledge to Connect program seeks to improve access to outpatient behavioral health services for individuals who are seeking care from an emergency department, with the longer-term goal of ensuring access is available before an emergency visit occurs. The project is a regional collaboration with four health systems, two Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, and multiple community-based behavioral health providers across South Jersey.
Pledge to Connect takes lessons learned from Camden Coalition’s 7-Day Pledge initiative — a city-wide effort to connect Medicaid patients to primary care within seven days of hospital discharge — and applies them to behavioral health. This project is also aligned with the performance targets for behavioral healthcare connection set out by New Jersey’s Quality Improvement Program (QIP-NJ).
Pledge to Connect partners include Oaks Integrated Care, Cooper University Health Care, and Virtua Health System. In the first phase of Pledge to Connect, Camden Coalition worked with these partners to design two new pathways to connect ED patients who have behavioral health needs to timely outpatient care.
Patients with more severe and persistent mental illness, who are in the ED for an acute mental health crisis, and who have complex social barriers receive face-to-face visits with Oaks case managers that are embedded in the ED. The case managers connect patients to ongoing care at Oaks, and also make connections to services like emergency housing, food resources, and substance use treatment.
Patients with milder to moderate mental health concerns and less complex social needs receive a follow-up phone call from Camden Coalition community health workers (CHWs) after they are discharged from the ED. CHWs check on how the individual is doing and offer to help them connect to behavioral health, primary care, and social services.
“We are grateful to SAMHSA for their recognition of our Pledge to Connect project,” said Camden Coalition President and CEO Kathleen Noonan, in a statement. “This project is a result of the strong partnerships we have with our ecosystem partners. We are proud of our work together and excited that Pledge to Connect’s innovative approach to mental health equity has been recognized in this way.”
The challenge prize for each winner is $50,000. Four awards are dedicated to the winning strategies that address mental health; three awards are dedicated to the winning strategies that address substance use prevention; three awards are dedicated to the winning strategies that address substance use treatment, respectively.
The other nine challenge winners are:
- Centro de Ayuda y Esperanza Latina Inc. (Massachusetts)
- Coastal Horizons (North Carolina)
- Comunilife, Inc. (New York)
- Mt. Olive Baptist Church (Ohio)
- North Carolina Youth Violence Prevention Center
- Prevention Partnership Inc. (Illinois)
- Ser Familia Inc. (Georgia)
- Southcentral Foundation (Alaska)
- Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center (Hawaii)
“The judges of SAMHSA’s Behavioral Health Equity Challenge were unanimous in saying how difficult it was to select winners from such an impressive pool of contestants,” said Miriam E. Delphin-Rittmon, Ph.D., the Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Mental Health and Substance Use, and the leader of SAMHSA, in a statement. “We look forward to building on the organizations’ best practices. SAMHSA continues to work to eliminate the systemic barriers that prevent all Americans from accessing behavioral health resources equitably.”
