UNC-PrimeCare4Youth
UNC-PrimeCare4Youth Trains Students in Integrated, Team-based Care
CORE TEAM
Lisa de Saxe Zerden, Meryl Kanfer, Steven Day, Dana Griffin (School of Education), Judy Schmidt (School of Medicine)
Across the United States and in North Carolina specifically, persistent shortages in the behavioral health workforce continue to impact quality of care. To meet this workforce shortfall, UNC-PrimeCare4Youth, an interprofessional partnership between the university’s School of Social Work, School of Education, and Department of Allied Health Sciences, is training future behavioral health professionals to provide trauma-informed, integrated behavioral health services to children, youth, and their families.
During the current 4-year, $1.92 million grant awarded by the Health Resources and Service Administration (HRSA), UNC-PrimeCare4Youth will fund and train 116 master’s-level social work, school counseling, and professional counseling students for work in interprofessional, youth-focused behavioral health settings across the state, including hospitals, community health centers, public health departments and judicial systems.
“I am so proud that HRSA sees value in our program,” said Lisa de Saxe Zerden, Ph.D., associate professor in the SSW and principal investigator for UNC-PrimeCare4Youth. “This tremendous support shows that they see social work, and our counseling partners, as part of the solution to expand and train the future behavioral health workforce.”
Participating final-year master’s students complete a specially designed course, participate in supplemental trainings, produce a capstone project, and connect with mentors in field placements throughout the state, where they gain hands-on experience over two semesters. Each student receives a $10,000 stipend to reduce their financial barriers to this specialized training and to incentivize their entry into the behavioral health workforce.
We are doing true integrated team-based care. The PrimeCare students get to engage with the patient on that level and provide services themselves from start to finish.
BETH CHILDS, MSW,
Director of Behavioral Health, Piedmont Health
UNC-PrimeCare4Youth builds off of Zerden’s work and leadership with UNC-PrimeCare, a School program originally funded in 2014 to expand the behavioral health workforce by training final year MSW students and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners to work in integrated settings. All total, UNC-Prime Care has been awarded more than $6.5 million in federal funding to help strengthen the nation’s behavioral health workforce. To date, PrimeCare programs have trained 315 master’s students at 117 field placement sites throughout North Carolina, with another 37 students expected to graduate in 2022-2023. Between 2021-2025, PrimeCare will award $1.16 million in stipends to participating students.
“It’s wonderful to be able to offer these exceptional students a stipend as they engage in the extra training that is preparing them to do this hard work,” said Meryl Kanfer, LCSW, PrimeCare program coordinator.
PrimeCare training appears to have a notable payoff for students post-graduation. A recent 5-year study found that PrimeCare graduates have greater success at securing jobs quickly after graduation and in jobs that tend to pay more than those obtained by non-participating graduates. The surging demand for behavioral health care workers post-COVID-19 may partly explain these graduates’ job market success.
Beth Childs, MSW, director of Behavioral Health at Piedmont Health, has witnessed the positive impact of PrimeCare programming on students before and after graduation. As a PrimeCare field placement site, Piedmont Health has hosted 12 students and in the past five years, has hired 16 PrimeCare graduates.
“From a training standpoint for the MSW students, I feel we are definitely a beneficial and authentic placement,” said Childs. “We’re able to offer some pretty intensive training and education and experiences that get the PrimeCare student ready to move into the workforce.”
With 12 locations in North Carolina, Piedmont Health primarily serves the Medicare, Medicaid, and uninsured populations of 17 counties. PrimeCare student trainees work on integrated care teams, including with medical providers, nursing staff, nutritionists, and pharmacists to provide direct behavioral health services. “They’re interacting very closely every day,” Childs said.
With an extensive funding horizon and growing student interest across campus divisions, UNC-PrimeCare4Youth is well positioned to train a future behavioral health workforce that aligns with the growing need for integrated behavioral health care.
by Jordan Wingate
Stakeholder Interview
Beth Childs, MSW, director of Behavioral Health, Piedmont Health
SSW: Could you tell me more about PrimeCare students’ learning and responsibilities at Piedmont Health?
BC: We’ve certainly noticed that PrimeCare students are well trained in providing brief integrated care, which is what we do at our sites. We encourage them to engage in all aspects of what a behavioral health consultant does at the clinic – everything from engaging the patient initially, to outreach about scheduling appointments, to providing the behavioral health interventions in the appointments. Eventually, they get to a point where they are providing direct services without direct supervision and then discussing the case with their field instructor to decide the appropriate course of treatment. In their course of providing direct care, I think they can be as impactful as a behavioral health care provider.
SSW: How do you see PrimeCare meeting workforce needs?
BC: The workforce for integrated care is definitely struggling to meet the need and demand for it. I currently have multiple positions open. But I think that integrated care is the future of our health care – that we need to recognize that the head and the body are not separate things. So, we definitely find PrimeCare extremely valuable and wish that there were more programs and more students. I have great, great respect for the program.
The Big Picture
- PrimeCare4Youth will train 116 MSW students to work in integrated behavioral health settings over the next four years.
- Funded by a $1.4 million grant, the latest of four grants awarded from HRSA, totaling over $6.5 million.
- PrimeCare has held 48 supplemental trainings for participating students and their field instructors.
- PrimeCare students have trained in 117 different field sites across North Carolina.
- By the end of academic year 2022-2023, 315 master’s students will have graduated from PrimeCare programs, with another 50 students expected to graduate in 2024-2025.
- PrimeCare programs have provided over $990,000 in funding to participating MSW students in the past two years.
Advancing equity. Transforming systems. Improving lives.
UNC School of Social Work
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building
325 Pittsboro Street | Campus Box 3550
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3550