Mental Health Care Critical To Metro Area

by Tom Cranshaw, CEO of TriCounty Community Mental Health Center and Chair of the Metropolitan Mental Health Stakeholder’s Continuum of Care Committee

Behavioral health services including mental health, substance abuse and developmental disability services, are critical for the people of Kansas City. They are even more crucial in the current economic downturn. When jobs are lost and families face cost increases in food and housing, the resulting stress can greatly impact mental health or substance abuse issues giving rise to depression or anxiety.

Kansas City is similar to communities across the nation faced with the growing challenge of ensuring that citizens with behavioral health issues have access to the services they need. Unfortunately, behavioral health care is too often underfunded, fragmented and not integrated with other services. Stakeholders in the Kansas City region are working together to understand and address these issues and identify community solutions to ensure residents receive a full continuum of behavioral health services that are compassionate and responsive to the needs of consumers and their families.

Over the last 18 months a bistate group of stakeholders representing behavioral health consumers, substance abuse, mental health and developmental disability providers, funders, the criminal justice system, housing organizations, state department representatives, and others voluntarily met to develop a forum — the Metropolitan Mental Health Stakeholders (MMHS). The MMHS allows stakeholders to seek collaborative solutions to address the behavioral health needs of the Kansas City community.

With funding from the local health care foundations and the Missouri Mental Health Transformation Project, Health Management Associates (HMA) was hired to complete a regional behavioral health needs assessment. HMA reviewed existing needs assessments, and conducted focus groups, surveys and interviews of Kansas City behavioral health stakeholders and consumers to gather information.

Last week, the 72-page report Behavioral Health Needs Assessment for Metropolitan Kansas City was released. The report clearly indicates that some good things are happening in behavioral health care in Kansas City and also identifies 17 key findings that substantiate the need for expanded behavioral health services, improved access and greater integration across the community.

The report lists eight specific recommendations that will improve behavioral health. It also provides national models of successful programs that can be replicated in Kansas City. The eight recommendations include: focus on recovery practices; community-wide initiative to address the housing needs of individuals with behavioral health disorders; addressing critical gaps in services; community effort to coordinate behavioral health, health care and social services; better integration of behavioral health and physical health care; regional plan to improve transportation to increase access to behavioral health services; reduction in funding silos; and development of a process to collect and evaluate key measures of the region’s behavioral health system.

I invite the community to join the MMHS to continue this dialogue on how we work together to improve behavioral health services in Kansas City and to review the report and make comments. By working together we can reduce the stigma often associated with mental disorders and we can jointly strive to meet the needs of consumers and their families by assuring access to a broad continuum of quality care which our consumers so richly deserve.