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Behavioral Health, Care Needs, and Community Services
- Publication Year :
- 2018
- Publisher :
- Oxford University Press, 2018.
-
Abstract
- The Acute Community Care Program (ACCP), otherwise known as mobile integrated health, which is based at Commonwealth Care Alliance (CCA) in Massachusetts uses specially trained paramedics to respond to urgent care calls to evaluate and treat patients, as appropriate, within their home or institutional residences (e.g., nursing homes) with the goal of avoiding unnecessary emergency department visits and potential hospital admissions. The population served by ACCP at CCA are clinically complex, socio-economically disadvantaged patients with heavy burdens of multimorbidity and physical and mental health disability. Funded by PCORI, we used in-depth, open-ended interviews to examine the training and skills, workplace experiences, and satisfaction of paramedics. We interviewed 23 people who are either ACCP paramedics or non-ACCP paramedics. Using a thematic analysis approach for qualitative analysis, we found important themes around Interpersonal skills and attributes of paramedics along with challenges of the profession. In particular, we found that paramedics: (1) report frequently working with patients with psychiatric needs; (2) report having inadequate behavioral health training; and (3) have many challenges in managing patients with psychiatric needs where they rely heavily on their experience and/or strong interpersonal skills, not training to address the needs of this population. This data indicates that there is a gap in paramedic training related to behavioral health. It is important to build the competencies of paramedics working in mobile integrated health so this workforce can appropriately respond to patients with psychiatric needs in order to better serve this population.
Details
- Language :
- English
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....d6c5f475b4d25360999bc716c86ed672