A new survey by the Mental Health Association in Forsyth County provides more evidence that local mental-health care needs improvement, and the survey provides some good suggestions about how to do that. Advocates should put this survey's recommendations to work, and they should also heed the lessons from another local study released earlier this month.
Local mental-health services have made scant progress, and may have even slipped in some areas during the past two years, according to the study of patients and providers, Richard Craver reported in Tuesday's Journal.
There was one bright spot in that disappointing news. The release of the survey results didn't come with the usual finger-pointing that has slowed progress on mental-health delivery. Both reports underscored problems that can only be corrected through cooperation and communication. As Andy Hagler, the executive director of the Mental Health Association, said, "there still needs to be a lot of stepping up to the plate by everybody -- advocates, providers, stakeholders."
Some progress has been made in mental-health care, but there's a long way to go, Hagler said.
CenterPoint Human Services, which oversees the delivery of mental-health care in this area, should lead the push for improvement. More community input would help efforts, including the proposal for a 24-hour psychiatric emergency department for the county.
The new survey, which will be released in full on March 15, took the anonymous opinions of 220 local patients and 83 providers. Among the findings, 68 percent of patients said they liked the services they were receiving, but only 46 percent said that those services were meeting their needs. There was also a slight decrease in the number of patients who felt free to complain about services.
The association has some good recommendations for improvement that include tracking patients through the treatment process and setting specific targets for satisfaction ratings and outcomes.
The study released earlier this month was done by Community Resource Alliance, a consulting company with an office in Hillsborough. It calls for more transparency and accountability in delivering mental-health care. It includes four main recommendations: improving community dialogue and participation; providing better identification of problems; increasing the availability of services at all levels and making them more user-friendly; and raising the expectation of "appropriate independence" of officials, politicians and administrators supervising local mental-health groups.
Much of the problems in the delivery of local mental-health care have been caused by, or at least aggravated by, the state's failed overhaul of its mental health-care system. The state is trying to correct the problems of that overhaul, which was supposed to shift the responsibility for providing care from state psychiatric hospitals to community programs.
Local mental health-care providers have been overloaded, and the delivery of care has suffered, despite a lot of hard work. Now, those involved in the delivery of mental-health care in Forsyth County should work even harder as they apply the lessons of the survey and study.
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