Concert Health is aiming to rearchitect the nation's behavioral health system with a mission to give every American access to higher quality behavioral health services in collaborative care with their trusted primary care provider. In today’s episode, Dr. Graham Taylor speaks with Virna Little. Virna is the Co-founder and Chief Clinical Officer for Concert Health, a national organization providing behavioral health services to primary care providers. Virna has a Doctoral degree in Psychology, a master’s in social work. She has over 22 years of experience as Senior Vice President for a larger FQHC network in New York overseeing over 300 behavioral health and community staff and worked in New York City Health and Hospitals as a city-wide family violence coordinator. Together they discuss the challenges of primary care in addressing mental health needs, the successes and improved patients from collaborative care, and the integration process and measurements used to identify patients, review patient progress, and build key relapse prevention. Concert Health is taking the mental health component off the hands of primary care physicians, making it easier for them, and supporting primary care physicians to truly practice whole person care.

The Social Justice Leadership Academy was created to help individuals really understand the impact of injustices and see the inequities and really how complex systemic racism really is. In today’s episode, Dr. Erin Elmore speaks with Tamanna Patel. Tamanna is the Director of Practice Improvement at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing. Tamanna has experience coaching communities in applying adaptive strategies with a focus on building relationships and trust, capacity-building opportunities, and long-term sustainability. Her particular interest includes addressing health equity and social determinants of health in rural communities. Together they discuss advancing social justice to advance mental wellbeing, effecting change on multiple levels: interpersonal, intrapersonal, organizational, communal, and systemic levels, and recommendations on how people can start their reflection on biases to be a leader in social justice reform. This begins with inner reflection and slowly getting to the awareness of what you can do within your sphere of control and create change.

There is a workforce crisis happening in the behavioral health industry. There are staff shortages, there’s a lower rate of same-day access, there's a lower threshold for stress, and the need for this like extreme resiliency that we haven't experienced before. In today’s episode, Dr. Graham Taylor speaks with Ayla Colella, LMHC. Ayla is a Senior Director at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing and works in project leadership, training, technical assistance, supervision, and public speaking. Her experience as a clinical practitioner, her rapport with members, and her work with Talkspace have given her a pragmatic perspective on developing relevant training for behavioral and mental health professionals. Together Graham and Ayla discuss the challenges of workforce training and staffing, the thinking behind the creation of programs, the unique understanding and empathic attunement to the needs of both those receiving services as well as practitioners, and finally, they discuss ways of providing the best services to support clinicians on a continuum of their career. The National Council has a deep and a very wide bench of consultants that do a lot of work with local community behavioral health organizations to help them both overcome or mitigate some of the stressors that they're experiencing, but also help them better understand how to develop a plan and address what it is they're going through and how to better articulate their needs.