|
G&A just completed facilitation of a year-long planning process for San Mateo County’s Mental Health Department to develop its plan for the Mental Health Services Act. As part of this, in partnership with Louise Rogers, SMCMH, G&A has directed the outreach to and assessment of un-served and under-served populations. Brightstar Ohlson designed the focus group protocols and trained all the facilitators responsible for conducting over 100 focus groups targeting linguistically, culturally, and geographically isolated communities, as well as populations that do not typically access mental health services (e.g. jail, homeless, and aged/isolated populations). G&A coded and analyzed all of these findings and designed an innovative data base that allows for reports of findings in relation to 18 different issues. This data base also allows reviewers to review the results of focus groups disaggregated by 20 different populations (by ethnicity, region, consumer type, age, etc.). See San Mateo County Strategic Planning & Cultural/Linguistic Capacity Assessment to review the PowerPoints, reports, and Access data base. As part of this process, G&A also facilitated two task forces one for adult services and one for older adult services. G&A facilitated over 50 hours of meetings involving consumers, community providers, family members, and county staff. In addition to facilitating these work groups, G&A developed comprehensive summaries of best practices that were used to inform deliberations of these task forces and was a co-author of the final plan submitted to the State. Finally, Paul Gibson served on both the Planning Team responsible for designing the planning process and planning all task force and steering committee meetings and on the Steering Committee responsible for overseeing the entire process. The end product of this effort is a comprehensive plan for transforming San Mateo County’s mental health system. |