Facing a growing number of patients with complex needs, SummitStone Health Partners needed to find innovative ways to balance patient care with staff efficiency. The northern Colorado provider of behavioral health services was preparing to move its acute care facility into a building six times its then size, with a highly acute patient population. “We […]

The patients who discharge coordinator Diane Williams sees coming to Genesis Detox in Brooklyn, New York, face complex health conditions that sometimes have relatively straight-forward solutions. People arrive with complex and chronic health care needs, often intertwined with critical daily living needs such as a lack of access to food, a place to sleep at […]

Clinical staff are the beating heart of every behavioral health organization. But the cards are stacked against them. “Staff have famously always been working hard to find ways to improve care, to make sure things are always getting better,” Professor Dean Fathers, ex-chair of the NHS Behavioral Health Provider and a Nottingham University Business School, […]

When Tracey Wrench was in the behavioral health trenches, what kept her up at night were patient outcomes and their connection to staffing challenges. But what kept her patients and staff up at night was something else. Acuity. “There are real challenges in terms of the complexity of patients, their presentations, the pressure on behavioral […]

Behavioral health patients need their sleep. They also need to be checked on while they sleep to ensure their safety. This dichotomy is at the heart of the challenge that behavioral health providers face in their Q15s, or fifteen-minute patient safety checks, as these common psychiatric hospital practices can at times be counterproductive to patient […]

Groggy. Irritable. Confused. A bad night’s sleep does it to everyone. So imagine what it does to someone with mental health issues. Sleep is a crucial component of mental health, playing a key role in emotion regulation, memory consolidation and cognitive function. Think of how often someone’s said to you, “You’ll feel better with a […]

Most health care providers agree that the overwhelming issue they currently face is staff retention and recruitment. The American Hospital Association recently called the workforce shortage that hospitals are experiencing a “national emergency,” projecting the overall shortage of nurses to reach 1.1 million by the end of the year. The situation is only getting worse. […]