Adopting a Novel Approach to Prevent and Address Patient Mistreatment of Staff in a Community Mental Health Center.

Verbal mistreatment of staff by patients is common in health care settings. Experiencing or witnessing mistreatment can have harmful psychological impacts, affecting well-being and clinical practice. As part of an effort to become an antiracist organization, an academic community mental health center based in Connecticut developed an initiative to address verbal mistreatment. Training in the Expect, Recognize, Address, Support, Establish (ERASE) framework was provided to 140 staff members. This training and subsequent actions to enhance the culture of safety were perceived as helpful by staff. Further development of the initiative is proceeding as the center's primary performance improvement program.

Stakeholders' perspectives on community-based participatory research to enhance mental health services.

Historically, consumers of mental health services have not been given meaningful roles in research and change efforts related to the services they use. This is quickly changing as scholars and a growing number of funding bodies now call for greater consumer involvement in mental health services research and improvement. Amidst these calls, community-based participatory research (CBPR) has emerged as an approach which holds unique promise for capitalizing on consumer involvement in mental health services research and change. Yet, there have been few discussions of the value added by this approach above and beyond that of traditional means of inquiry and enhancement in adult mental health services. The purpose of this paper is to add to this discussion an understanding of potential multilevel and multifaceted benefits associated with consumer-involved CBPR. This is accomplished through presenting the first-person accounts of four stakeholder groups who were part of a consumer-involved CBPR project purposed to improve the services of a local community mental health center. We present these accounts with the hope that by illustrating the unique outcomes associated with CBPR, there will be invigorated interest in CBPR as a vehicle for consumer involvement in adult mental health services research and enhancement.

The Connecticut Mental Health Center Patient Profile Project: application of a service needs index.

This article describes a quality assurance effort aimed at defining the characteristics of the patient population of the Connecticut Mental Health Center, a statefunded agency that provides comprehensive clinical and rehabilitative services to persons with mental illness. Also described is how this information guided management decisions in both caseload distribution and clinical service development. This "Patient Profile Project" was informed by research principles which view evaluation as continual, rather than terminal activity that involves key stakeholders from all levels within the mental health system of care and makes maximum use of data in ongoing performance improvement initiatives. The service-need index that the project produced represents our first efforts to accurately capture service need and use it in clinical decision making. This review of the Connecticut Mental Health Center Patient Profile Project illustrates the utility of a continuous evaluation system in promoting improvements in a large mental health treatment system.