Pierce County, WA: With the support of Pierce County and a $1.9 million grant, WorkForce Central is doubling down on efforts to strengthen and support the behavioral health workforce in Pierce County.
As a result of ongoing efforts to identify and address challenges in this field of work, WorkForce Central has formally established the Pierce County Behavioral Health Consortium, made up of a cross-sector group of employers and community organizations focused on recruiting, training, and retaining a diverse and high-quality behavioral health workforce to meet the growing need in our region.
“Access to quality behavioral health services is critical in growing the local workforce,” said Kari Haugen, Director of Workforce Partnerships for WorkForce Central. “The Pierce County Behavioral Health Consortium is a dedicated network of organizations deeply invested in the well-being of individuals and families in our community.”
The foundation for this consortium was formed through the work of 15 behavioral healthcare providers and partners who collectively identified a need for unified strategy and investments. This group has been meeting over the last 18 months and, during that time, identified key factors impacting this workforce, including pay, training support, and burnout.
The pathway to becoming a mental and behavioral health professional is complex and involves advanced education, internship hours that are often unpaid, and a cumbersome licensure process. It is difficult to manage under the best of circumstances, but those requirements can create roadblocks for students and jobseekers who already face barriers to education and employment based on systemic and individual circumstances. Opportunities for reducing these barriers and creating dynamic access points for these pathways is the driving force behind this regional work.
The consortium has identified five key areas for investment using this grant funding from Pierce County Behavioral Health Tax.
- Career Mapping, Pathways Awareness, and Translation includes dynamic and interactive mapping for prospective and current behavioral health providers to demonstrate opportunities for entry and growth along the continuum.
- Intern Retention Support focuses on supporting interns through creating an earn-and-learn model, which will greatly increase retention of this part of the workforce.
- Increased Supervision Capacity focuses on testing a model where part- and full-time supervisors serve multiple behavioral healthcare providers to increase both the quality of supervision and the number of interns receiving support.
- Behavioral Health Workforce Training proposes investment in cross-agency and agency-supported training to alleviate training pressure on community-based providers.
- Behavioral Health Apprenticeship Pathways focuses on growing an apprenticeship model within Pierce County that has significant potential for growing the behavioral health workforce.
The goal of this project is to increase workforce retention through support of at least 350 prospective and current interns across multiple behavioral health providers, create apprenticeship host sites, and recruit and train 20 full-time apprentices as behavioral health techs and peer counselors.
To learn more about the consortium or to get involved, contact Jami Armstrong at jarmstrong@workforce-central.org.
