Hello!
I am Kristina Daniel and I am the Chief Behavioral Health Officer for Valley-Wide Health Systems, Inc. We are a FQHC in Southern Colorado. We serve many rural areas and provide services to over 33,000 people. I am a licensed professional counselor and licensed addictions counselor.

At Valley-Wide, the integrated BH program started about 3-4 years ago and I came on board 1.5 years ago. We had some trouble early in the program getting it going, but we have now adopted the PCBH model and only provide consultation and brief interventions during visits (we do provide some(4-6 sessions) brief 30-minute follow-up sessions, but it is not traditional BH outpatient care in the clinic). I currently have 10 integrated BHPs and need another 4-5 to be fully staffed. I am also looking for a supervisor to support the team.

We also provide traditional outpatient services out of a separate space. I currently am fully staffed in this setting.

The challenges I have had related to recruitment have been related to people not understanding integrated care when they apply and think they can provide “traditional” services just in a different setting. We have changed our recruitment processes already so potential candidates meet with me even before an interview to discuss what our model looks like to see if they are still interested. We have also spent a lot of time educating our providers, HR, and other team members who help with interviews and community recruitment about behavioral health. In the last year, the understanding by our recruitment team has increased, so that has been great!

I am so excited about learning new ways to recruit. I do think this population has specific needs and requests that are atypical in an FQ environment. I am also hoping to find ways that we can find seasoned clinicians who are willing to shift gears into this exciting system. I do not mind supervising new clinicians, but I have found that sometimes the confidence that is needed in the PC setting is sometimes just not built in newer clinicians who are still figuring out their processes. So, it just makes it tougher. We do it, but it has not been overly successful. So, if there are some techniques to help new clinicians be successful, that would be super helpful.

Sorry for this being so long! I have high hopes for this process.

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