Strengthening the Behavioral Health Workforce: Spotlight on PITCH

Abstract

Robinson served as a counselor and administrator of vocational rehabilitation counseling and employment services to clients with severe mental illness and other barriers to employment. Additionally, she served as a consultant and adjunct professor at Wilberforce University. Her areas of expertise include psychiatric rehabilitation, disability advocacy, multicultural counseling, ethics, and dual diagnosis.Dr. Robinson serves as the institute director for study abroad programs held in Italy and Botswana.

Integrated primary care psychology training programs: Challenges and strategies.

“…Although this study focused on training psychologists, to the extent that core integrated care competencies are shared across disciplines, the findings could also be applicable to other behavioral health occupations involved in the important efforts of growing an integrated primary care workforce. For example, similar funding/reimbursement barriers and variable leadership buy-in were reported in training programs for marriage and family therapists as well as other licensed professional counselors (Fox et al, 2012;Lloyd-Hazlett et al, 2020). Consistent strategies on teaching interprofessional collaboration practice and ownership of their professional identities were also found in training programs for social work students (Alessi et al, 2022;Held et al, 2019).…”

Assessing counseling student self-reported competencies in primary care behavioral health.

“…Students were directly supervised by an on-site clinical supervisor, as well as participated in biweekly group supervision within their internship course. A detailed description of the training program is described elsewhere (Lloyd-Hazlett et al, 2020). Due to training sequence differences in measures, we used data from cohorts 2–4 for analysis.…”

“…Thus, the need for specialized training for counselors in PCBH is also growing. One program specifically designed to address this need is the Program for the Integrated Training of Counselors in Behavioral Health (PITCH), funded by a Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) grant (Lloyd-Hazlett et al, 2020). As preparing counseling students to work as Behavioral Health Consultants (BHCs) in PCBH is an emerging area of training and practice, evaluation of both training models and competencies are needed.…”