The National Council for Mental Wellbeing (NCMW) launched the Center for Workforce Solutions in 2023 in partnership with The College for Behavioral Health Leadership (CBHL) and Health Management Associates (HMA). The partnership is leveraging Collective Impact to address the workforce crisis, and using a cross-sector approach to address the long-standing challenges for expanding and solidifying the behavioral health workforce. The partners identified a gap in advancing workforce solutions with many national convenings creating various sets of recommendations without a coordinated or clear approach to moving recommendations to action.
Why use Collective Impact?
- Workforce challenges and solutions require a cross-sector approach including changes in Federal and State regulations as well as at the provider level. Need a coordinated approach to truly reach change.
- There are a lot of recommendations nationally with stalled action in many cases because the recommendations require other implementers to act.
- No single accountable entity to ensure recommendations move forward
- Need for cross-sector agreement on strategies and then cross-sector implementation
- Scale of the challenge can create overwhelm and inertia to address big gaps
- Leverage the work being done across partners while building a coordinated effort
Check out this webinar recording to learn more about the history of this effort.
2023 Progress
The partnership was busy in 2023 with activities to build multiple avenues for change:
- Building a robust partnership and backbone for the collective impact approach which is working seamlessly to support a national and cross-sector group of leaders to support implementation of recommendations that often require multiple levels of the system and cross-sector engagement.
- Developing a draft framework for the complexity of the workforce challenges and solutions and thinking about the implementers (regulators, policy makers, providers, and others) that are needed to implement recommendations.
- Cross-walking more than 400 recommendations from national sources including national and state approaches as well as provider lessons using the framework to understand consistent recommendations, identify themes and prioritize where to focus moving recommendations to action.
- Launching a Behavioral Health Provider and Association ECHO on workforce building a network of providers to share case studies and learn from each other and discuss innovative solutions for addressing workforce challenges.
- Continuing to identify funding support to move the collective impact approach forward.
What’s Coming in 2024?
- National Workforce Conversation—a virtual meeting open to all interested nationally to communicate and share information broadly and to collectively track what’s working and lessons learned in workforce efforts.
- Launch Steering Committee and Working Groups—which will include national key decision makers who will guide a coordinated approach to implementing recommendations and working cross-sector to be accountable to change.
- Launch Second ECHO for Providers and Associations to continue to share what’s working and improve the immediate workforce crisis at the provider level. Stay Tuned https://www.thenationalcouncil.org/program/center-for-workforce-solutions/engage/echo/
- NatCon’24: Register and join the Workforce Development and Talent Management Track (April 15 – 17, 2024)