Integrated Primary Care and Health Behavior Support: A Survey of Behavioral Health Providers.

Objectives: Many behavioral health providers (BHPs) in primary care practices spend a majority of their time addressing mental health rather than behavior change. We wanted to better understand the practice of BHPs in integrated primary care.

Methods: Survey of BHPs from practices participating in the Colorado State Innovation Model (SIM) initiative.

Virtual Care for Behavioral Health Conditions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need for behavioral health care services. A substantial portion of mental health care transitioned to virtual care during the COVID-19 pandemic, remains virtual today, and will continue that way in the future. Mental health needs continue to grow, and there has been growing evidence showing the efficacy of virtual health for behavioral health conditions at the system, provider, and patient level.

The Hope Health and Wellness Clinic: Outcomes of Individuals with Serious Mental Illness in a Bidirectional Integrated Care Clinic.

The integrated health home, the Hope Health and Wellness Clinic, provides comprehensive primary and behavioral health services to adult clients of a Community Mental Health Center in Aurora, Colorado. A program evaluation of the effectiveness of this clinic was conducted over a 4 year period. Physical health data (Body Mass Index BMI, HbA1c, cholesterol, blood pressure, and waist circumference measurements) and self-report data (social connectedness, everyday functioning, psychological distress, perceived health, satisfaction with services) were tracked across time.

Veteran preferences for end-of-life care.

Understanding one's disease and prognosis is a difficult thing for anyone to be faced with. Thinking about end-of-life issues can be incredibly stressful, and this is true for individuals who have knowledge of the options and services that are available to them. Not having knowledge about these issues can make facing decisions confusing, to the point of impossible.

Ritual: the final expression of care.

Hospice nurses know that all their patients will die. There are several potential benefits of including rituals and healing practices into the hospice care setting for staff. Evidence suggests that not only does it provide an outlet for hospice workers to express their grief and reflect on their work in an accepting environment; providing closure for their patient's passing but it has also been shown to decrease the risk of burnout and compassion fatigue.

When there is nothing left to do, there is everything left to do.

Circle of Life Hospice in Reno, Nevada is not only a special place for patients and their families to find peace through a sense of meaning and purpose at the end of their life but is also an important place for staff to take care of each other as they take care of those who are dying. The Circle of Life Hospice provides a unique opportunity to examine carefully the power of providing an outlet for hospice staff to process their grief and offer support for one another so that they can continue to give the "everything that there is to do to" to their patients.

An innovative model for conducting a participatory community health assessment.

Understanding a community's perceived health care needs is essential to the promotion of community health. The purpose of this article is to review various methodologies used to assess community health care needs, and then provide a case example of a transcultural exploration of perceived health care needs of the residents of Utila, Honduras. This study presents a template for using unique assessment tools to empower communities to identify their health care needs.