AACP Newsletter, Volume 12,
Number 4, Autumn 1998
AACP Staffing Task Force
The Task Force began the process by reviewing salient literature related to the issues. The adoption of preliminary guidelines for the process occurred next. These include:
- A commitment that our discovery and product development process will be driven by consumer and family member needs (not driven by available resources), as well as be inclusive of input from those mental health care professionals who work in the public sector.
- That we should focus on defining and articulating what functions and services, what natural supports and professional supports need to be in place to meet consumer and family member needs.
- Assumptions that our product needs to be broadly inclusive, endorsing multidisciplinary approaches, treatment team approaches, and that we display an endorsement of both the "direct" and "indirect" roles played by psychiatrists in the public sector.
- Support the use of LOCUS
in the process of defining the array of services necessary to meet consumer-defined needs,
which we can then translate into a formula for determining a continuum of "minimal" to "desirable" staffing guidelines, dependent on varying levels of multidisciplinary staffing capacities.
- Our ultimate product should reflect a synthesis of all of the above, as well as espousing principles of mental health care professional competencies. These include ethics, knowledge, skills, adequate credentialing, teaching, training, and cultural sensitivity.
We have developed and distributed questionnaires which ask consumers, family members, and mental health care providers to designate priorities in terms of services provision. These data are still being collected and analyzed. From these data, we hope to glean those services which consumers, family members, and professionals can agree are imperative to a clinical continuum. Once the data analysis is completed, we will attempt to weave together the aforementioned parameters with LOCUS and the salient parameters noted in extant literature into a preliminary product.
Anyone interested in being on the Task Force can contact Jackie Feldman at jfeldman@psych.uabmc.edu.
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