Educational Collaboration in Psychiatric Disability, Rehabilitation, and Recovery: Developing Transformative Solutions

Abstract

This article describes an innovative statewide collaboration between schools of social work and public mental health departments to transform social work curriculum and address the workforce crisis in public mental health service systems. The collaborative partnership has fostered the development of a Mental Health Initiative that has developed a set of mental health competencies offered in each of the participating master's in social work (MSW) programs in California. These competencies identify critical skills and knowledge necessary to support recovery, resiliency, evidence-based practice, and psychosocial rehabilitation principles. A statewide stipend program to support final-year MSW students in their graduate study and a requirement for a year of employment payback in the public mental health system is also presented, as well as a brief discussion of the organizational and structural principles supporting the collaborative organization. Current successes, future challenges, and strategies for the partnership collaborative in their task of developing a workforce are addressed.

Beyond Disaster Preparedness: Building a Resilience-Oriented Workforce for the Future

“…The literature review identified several elements of training that could support resilience education. Several studies highlighted interprofessional education (IPE) programs [ 25 , 30 ]. The field of resilience is clearly transdisciplinary and requires practitioners to be trained in a wide variety of areas.…”

“…The field of resilience is now facing the same types of complexities. While resilience is a broad field, requiring skills from a wide variety of professions, much of the reviewed literature on training was much more narrow in scope, such as collaborations between schools of social work and public mental health departments [ 30 ] or incorporating disaster preparedness training into health education curricula [ 32 , 33 ], in particular, for nurses [ 34 , 35 , 36 ] and physicians [ 37 , 38 ]. IPE for the resilience-oriented workforce needs to be much more interdisciplinary than is currently in practice.…”