ABSTRACT
Under the influence of managed care and diminished funding, the mental health field is undergoing a major transformation. Existing mental health programs, departments, and agencies are downsizing and restructuring to develop new types of service delivery systems. Organizations must change to survive; yet necessary and adaptive change may be resisted in numerous ways by providers whose reactions and behaviors may reduce the viability of their own programs and agencies. This paper explores various characteristics and reactions of mental health care professionals as they face great stress, professional devaluation, and necessary organizational change and restructuring. Adaptive and maladaptive patterns in response to potential organizational change are explored. The role of the leader in guiding and implementing programmatic changes and in dealing with denial and resistance is highlighted. Strategies to enhance the prospects for adaptive organizational change are offered.
Subject(s)
Attitude of Health Personnel , Managed Care Programs/trends , Mental Health Services/trends , Forecasting , Health Facility Closure/trends , Humans , Managed Care Programs/organization & administration , Mental Health Services/organization & administration , Quality Assurance, Health Care/organization & administration , Quality Assurance, Health Care/trends , United StatesABSTRACT
Initial encoding of information in the elderly was examined within the framework of controlled vs automatic processing. Controlled processing demands conscious effort, whereas automatic processing is cost-free in this regard. The suggestion is that adequate encoding and storage could be hindered if semantic depth is not accessed automatically. A task developed by Warren to investigate automatic processing in young Ss was used to test whether words reached semantic levels automatically in elderly Ss. Twenty-four females, 12 young and 12 old, heard word triads. Each triad was followed by visual presentation of a single word in colored ink. For both young and old Ss, color-naming latency for the visual words was significantly higher if the word itself was present in the auditory triad. This indicated that the visual words were processed to the level of meaning automatically in both young and old Ss.
