Behavioral Health Supervision Funding Opportunity: Year 1 Summary
/Background
In 2021 the Better Health Together Board allocated a portion of remaining Integrated Managed Care dollars to support behavioral health (BH) workforce initiatives. This included support for organizations with SUD and master’s level behavioral health staff to provide supervision so that staff can gain critical licensure.
BHT used the Behavioral Health Forum, a gathering of behavioral health providers and integrated primary care partners, to gather feedback about supervision needs and barriers. Based on this feedback, we designed an approach for expending the allocated dollars and distributed all $150,000 to eligible organizations.
In 2022, the Behavioral Health Forum became a self-governing body and used participatory budgeting to allocate the remaining $1.2 million of Integrated Managed Care funds to support the Eastern Washington behavioral health workforce. See this 2022 Year in Review Blog Post for more information. As part of this process, Forum members allocated another $150,000 to continue funding behavioral health supervision. BHT released this funding opportunity in February 2023, and organizations are currently using it to support their behavioral health supervision needs.
Results
As of July 2023:
87 staff received licensure supervision across all 15 organizations and 21 completed supervision hours needed for licensure
More than $11,000 went toward licensure costs, including application and testing fees
8 out of 15 partners used all funding by the 1-year mark
15 Partners completed 1-year reporting
14 organizations had applied for Round Two Behavioral Health Supervision Support funding, including eight organizations that received funding in Round One and five organizations that are new to this funding stream.
Feedback from Partners
CCEW
“Thank you very much for your support of these unrecoverable funds that are essential to providing adequate, high-quality behavioral health care in our community. Finding sources of funding continues to be an ongoing need for our program.”
Excelsior
“This grant has been a significant help in establishing a social worker supervision program, and our organization looks forward to developing and expanding this intention moving forward. We thank Better Health Together for their assistance in implementing this helpful workforce development tool.”
Frontier
“The BHT contracted funds were beneficial in supporting an important benefit for employees and is greatly appreciated.”
Passages
“This grant has provided Passages with a valuable recruitment tool that has allowed us to hire mental health therapists. New and existing staff are grateful for the opportunity to obtain licensing supervision while working at our organization.“