Benchmarks' Partnering for Excellence (PFE) works to implement trauma informed practices inside local social service agencies while also assisting in building a bridge between child welfare and Medicaid managed care for behavioral health (LME/MCOs).
Annually, PFE gets the child welfare agencies, Medicaid LME/MCOs, private mental health providers, and stakeholders together to review the current state of the initiative. Out of the last meeting came the idea that the child welfare agencies should get together to troubleshoot barriers and learn from one another. Donna Fayko, Director of Rowan Department of Social Services (DSS), offered to help plan as well as host the initial meeting. It was the first time in the projects' 6 years that the DSS agencies came together.
The meeting included an opportunity for the agencies to spend more time with their counterparts at other agencies. The agencies discussed what was working well with the pieces of the PFE Pathway:
1. Trauma Screening
2. Mental Health Assessment
3. Integrated Child Plan
4. Quality Service Array
5. Effective Care Management
A theme that ran through the day was finding ways to make PFE "part of the fabric" of daily practice. One of the takeaways from the meeting was that the Directors could talk regularly with one another to troubleshoot concerns at a systems level as well as discuss ways to influence state policy and practice with PFE's lessons learned. Those calls are in the process of being scheduled now.
Karen Pritchard, Director of Cleveland County DSS, had this to say: " I enjoyed celebrating our successes at our 1st PFE Tri-County DSS Collaborative Meeting. The meeting was useful in that we were able to learn from each other and plan for the future to keep rocking with PFE."
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