Dr. Nev Jones has recently been awarded a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) R01 as multiple-primary-investigator (MPI) in collaboration with Dr. Josh Breslau (RAND). Awarded $3.48 million in funding, the project is entitled "A Service User Informed Study of Certified Community Behavioral Health Center (CCBHC) Implementation and Impact in New York State" and will involve an innovative collaboration with the Alliance for Rights and Recovery, a national leader in recovery- and rights-based services for individuals with psychiatric disabilities based in New York. Specifically, the Pitt and RAND research team will partner with the Alliance to hire peer co-researchers, who will play central roles in evaluating the implementation and impact of the CCBHC model on service users labelled with serious mental illness.
"I'm thrilled to be partnering with Dr. Breslau, other RAND investigators and the Alliance on Rights and Recovery on this project,” said Dr. Jones. “CCBHCs have the potential to significantly impact the landscape of public mental health services in the US, but we currently lack a deeper understanding of how the model impacts programming and outcomes across multiple levels. The integration of lived experience co-researchers and a project management structure that emphasizes integration throughout is also a huge opportunity to further develop the relationships and methods central to transforming systems."
The CCBHC model is one of the most significant policy interventions in community-based mental health services in decades, and it has appropriately drawn broad attention from policymakers because of its potential to address chronic problems of fragmentation and under-funding of public mental health services. As the model is further expanded nationally in coming years, evidence from rigorous studies will be needed to guide policymaking and organizational decision-making. This study will contribute to the future of CCBHC policy, and community mental health policy more generally by combining an implementation science driven examination of CCBHCs with a focus on service-user perspectives and robust quantitative assessment of the impact of the model on the major service use outcomes.