CIPC Blog

The Curbsiders Addiction Medicine Podcast just wrapped up a stellar series on Addiction Medicine that has enormous applicability for any primary care clinician. This series is packed with evidence-based education on caring for patients with substance disorders.

We are thrilled to follow up on the successful second annual Group Medical Visit conference held on September 16^th and co-chaired by CIPC’s primary care clinician, Paula Gardiner, MD. The conference was attended by 160 people from all over the world and there was a wide range of places represented including academic medical centers, community health centers, private practice, and the Veterans Administration.

This is the 4th and final part of a 4-blog post series where Dr. Edwin Boudreaux chats with us about his work recently highlighted by NIH: HEAL Research Spotlight, Taking Suicide Prevention into Primary Care Settings. 

This is the 3rd of a 4-blog post series where Dr. Edwin Boudreaux chats with us about his work recently highlighted by NIH: HEAL Research Spotlight, Taking Suicide Prevention into Primary Care Settings.

About Edwin D. Boudreaux, PhD:

Dr. Boudreaux approaches the challenge associated with solving seemingly intractable barriers to deliver high-quality behavioral healthcare by working with interdisciplinary teams who have complementary expertise and perspectives and figuring out the right balance between human centered approaches and the use of technology to facilitate workflow.

Dr. Boudreaux approaches the challenge associated with solving seemingly intractable barriers to deliver high-quality behavioral healthcare by working with interdisciplinary teams who have complementary expertise and perspectives and figuring out the right balance between human-centered approaches and the use of technology to facilitate workflow.

First let me say that the PHQ-9 is a fairly good tool for screening patients and identifying those who have an unmet behavioral health need.  While I think computer adaptive testing is a better approach and the way of the future, there are still plenty of settings where a paper and pencil PHQ-9 is the best we can do.

For years employers in many sectors, including healthcare, have offered funding for continuing education as an employment “benefit.”  As healthcare increasingly focuses on quality of care, are there good reasons to think about this investment?

A Behavioral Health staff huddle at the Barre Family Health Center

Does more integration mean better healthcare? What if you work in a rural practice or in a busy practice in the center of a major city? Dr. Daniel Mullin and colleagues developed the Practice Integration Profile (PIP) to create a measure of integrated primary care that compares practices and monitors integration in a practice over time. Read the post by clicking on the title.

This blog post is authored by a graduate of our 2014 “Primary Care Behavioral Health” course.  Many of our former students go on to do significant work in the healthcare field.  Dr. Cherepanov’s experience includes global mental health work in Chernobyl, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Liberia.  She now works as lead clinician for refugee services at Lynn Community Health Center—one of CIPC’s long-term partners in integration training.

During public health complex emergencies (CE), healthcare workers play a crucial role. This work can be rewarding as it reminds health professionals about their mission and purpose. But just like “a perfect storm,” CE disrupts the fabric of community life, and the responders are subjected to the same ailments as their patients (Cherepanov, 2019). When responding to international CEs, humanitarians accumulated a great deal of experience dealing with extreme work stresses. This experience offers a valuable insight into the psychological challenges the frontline healthcare workers face during the pandemic and the best practices for managing them. 

This post first appeared in January 2021 in the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.