National Council for Mental Wellbeing
1400 K St. NW
Washington DC, DC
United States
Founded in 1969, the National Council is a membership organization that drives policy and social change on behalf of nearly 3,500 mental health and substance use treatment organizations and the more than 10 million children, adults, and families they serve. They are a new organization to us and proposing to break ground in terms of progress toward behavioral and oral health integration.
This project builds on foundational work completed in 2020 to assemble a panel of 14 national experts in oral and behavioral healthcare to refine oral and behavioral health strategies, develop an environmental scan of emerging models of care, and identify policy options to help advance the work of integration. This work resulted in the publishing of an “Environmental Scan of Oral Health and Behavioral Health Integration Models, which explores the associations between oral, mental, substance use challenges as well as the bi-directional nature of the relationship between these areas of care.
This proposal builds on the environmental scan work whereby the National Council will implement a 10-month long national learning collaborative, using the Project ECHO model, for organizations/providers to test new coordinated and integrated approaches to behavioral, oral, and substance use care. Some of the specific tasks include:
Partnering with Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics (CCBHCs) which are uniquely set up through flexible payment models to support the expansion of mental health and substance use services to advance prospective payment models that emphasize value over volume.
Implementing site based organizational self-assessments of each organization to identify specific goals related to coordination and integration
Leading site-based population health needs assessments of the catchment areas of each provider organization
Facilitating a 10-month long ECHO series that will result in a collaborative report on the results within the goals of year 1 looking at provider training and implementation on the behavioral health side and implementation of screening, intervention, and referral on the oral health side.
Additionally, the National Council will look to operationalize a health and racial equity lens through this work by building it into the training and learning experience, weaving it into the organizational self-assessments, and supporting incorporation of the community voice within each of the relative project sites.
The original budget for this proposal was $249,939. The Internal Review Committee recognized the value of this emerging field of integration, however had a follow up conversation to explore a smaller investment amount. As a result, the recommendation is to fund the project in the amount of $200,000. The bulk of the budget will go to personnel with the remaining going to stipends for the project sites and honorariums for the consultants and speakers involved.
The overall budget for the National Council is $51,686,638 which means this grant represents less than 1% of their organizational budget.