Our Behavioral Health Services team just finished and published our FY 12 Annual Report. The new report identifies the number of clients served by service area, funding category and program; and includes programmatic financial reports of revenues, expenditures and administrative costs. In it, you'll see that we received a total of about $1.46B in funding for FY 2012 for behavioral health services. Our Agency [...]
We all need to take care of both our physical and behavioral health needs in order to be healthy. The mind and body aren't separated- and neither should the health-care delivery system- especially for folks with a serious mental illness. Folks with a serious mental illness die more than 25 years earlier than the general [...]
The tragedy in Connecticut has reminded us all about how important mental health and mental health treatment is to ensure that we have a society that functions in a way that we’d all like. To be truly effective, a behavioral and mental health system needs to make sure parents, teachers, doctors and emergency department staff, [...]
Back in 2009, AZ had the 9th highest rate of suicide in the U.S. In that year 1,060 Arizonans took their own lives- so it’s easy to see why suicide prevention is an agency priority and is featured in our Strategic Map as a Winnable Battle. Since we’re responsible for the state’s behavioral health system- [...]
This is one to remember. SBIRT is an acronym for a behavioral health intervention that stands for “Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment”. The technical definition is “ … a comprehensive, integrated, public health approach to the delivery of early intervention and treatment services for persons with substance use disorders…” A more metaphorical (is that [...]
This morning St. Mary’s Food Bank picked up 2 ½ tons of canned food to help those in need… courtesy of our Agency food drive. We set a goal of bringing in 4,000 pounds and we made it. When you combine the cans and cash, it equals more than 5,000 pounds of food. Good work to [...]
The vision of the Department is to ideally achieve a state of Health and Wellness for all Arizonans and our mission is to promote, protect, and improve the health and wellness of individuals and communities in Arizona. The updated mission and vision statements are helping us build public health value in-house as well as in [...]
One of our primary objectives over the last couple of years has been to shift the focus of our performance measures away from process and procedures toward actual outcomes. In other words, we don’t want to measure our success on whether someone’s paperwork is right, but on whether the services we provide actually help folks achieve [...]
We all need to take care of both our physical and behavioral health needs in order to be healthy. The mind and body aren't separated- and neither should the health-care delivery system- especially for folks with a serious mental illness. Folks with a serious mental illness die more than 25 years earlier than the general [...]
Our regulatory reform effort in Licensing is rolling along. We’ve already held rules work group meetings with representatives from behavioral health inpatient and residential facilities and are incorporating the Stakeholder comments into our next iteration of our draft rules. In November, we’ll start holding rules work group meetings with representatives from behavioral health outpatient settings. This’ll truly [...]
