Behavioral health workforce education and training program - iona university will expand the scope of our successful iona college collaborates (IC collaborates) project, which has increased the…

Behavioral health workforce education and training program - iona university will expand the scope of our successful iona college collaborates (IC collaborates) project, which has increased the capacity of the mental and behavioral health workforce to address the needs of our community, especially individuals who have been underserved and marginalized within existing systems of care, through didactic and experiential training in trauma-informed, culturally responsive, interprofessional behavioral health services. Our continuation project, iona collaborates (IC) will continue to prepare graduate-level marriage and family therapy (MFT), occupational therapy (OT), and school psychology students, but will expand to include both our mental health counseling (MHC) and social work (mssw) graduate students, and will adopt a focus on underserved children, adolescents, and/or young adults, for a total of 48 IC fellows. IC will also increase the number of experiential training sites serving youth in high-needs/high-demand areas and provide additional training for experiential site supervisors. We will also utilize stipends and targeted strategies to recruit a diverse workforce interested in working with children, adolescents, and young adults. Iona meets the requirements for the program funding priority 1 and funding preferences 1, 2 and 3. The service area of our project includes southern westchester county, new york, as well as the bronx borough of new york city, both of which have a high number of hrsa-designated mental health professional shortage areas (hpsa-MH), medically underserved areas (muas), and medically underserved populations (mups). Moreover, the westchester county cities of new rochelle, mount vernon, and yonkers have sections identified as "health disparity hotspots," characterized by significant racial health disparities, which are deeply rooted in systemic inequities, cultural stigma, and barriers to accessing quality care. In addition, children and adolescents in our community are experiencing high levels of behavioral and mental health needs, including emotional or behavioral health needs, severe depression risk, gaps in treatment resources and treatment follow up; these are even more disparate for black or hispanic youth. With bhwet continuation funding, iona will build the capacity of our program to better prepare students to work with children (ages 5 - 12), adolescents (ages 13 - 18), and young adults (ages 19 - 25) in muas and who experience high rates of adverse childhood experiences (aces), poverty, and other social traumas. We will: (1) develop new curricula that focus on the behavioral health needs of children, adolescents, and young adults who have been marginalized due to race, culture, income, gender, or other factor; (2) incorporate additional training using an interprofessional education (IPE) framework focused on team-building skills, knowledge of professions, patient-centered care, the impact of culture on healthcare, educational delivery, and an interprofessional experiential component; (3) increase interprofessional learning by engaging two new disciplines (master of science in social work and master of arts of mental health counseling) in IC programing; (4) expand our experiential learning sites to include those that serve children and young people, especially young people with social or environmental risk factors for behavioral disorders or mental illness; (5) increase faculty and site-supervisor training in interprofessional collaborative practice, trauma-informed care, and culturally responsive services; and (6) continue to use the IPE framework to create community, whole self- development, and interpersonal skills to support graduate students in pursuit of their degrees and professional lives.