System Partner Interviews
Every system that includes IECMH services faces serious challenges in building and keeping a skilled, diverse, and well-trained workforce. In many cases, agencies and organizations have launched their own efforts to better understand the problems and try out solutions.
We wanted to learn from these existing efforts and build on them in a coordinated way. We conducted 13 interviews with 24 key partners from across several child and family serving systems with the goal of:
Identify common workforce challenges;
Understand the strategies believed to be most effective for real, lasting change; and
Find out what resources currently exist to help carry out these strategies.
Who was Interviewed
Interview participants represented the following systems:
Behavioral Health
Child Welfare
Early Childhood Education including ECEAP and Head Start
Early Supports for Infants and Toddlers
Home Visiting
Infant-Early Childhood Mental Health Consultation
Primary Care and Pediatrics
Public Health
Across interviews, the workforce challenges identified were not unique to individual systems, but shared across all. Importantly, interviews comments were consistent with the feedback from provider and administrator focus groups. This suggests there is a shared understanding of both the problems and the opportunities for action.
Many workforce improvement projects fail to lead to lasting change. Even when recommendations are well-informed and potentially powerful, implementation often falls short. This may be because existing tools and resources are not always clearly identified or connected to action steps. To bridge the gap between recommendations and action, interviewees were asked to share about the current efforts already underway and available resources that could help turn recommendations into real, system-wide improvements.
What We Heard
The chart below provides a detailed description of ideas we heard in the interviews, organized to match the 22 topic that emerged from the provider and administrator focus groups. Individuals or organizations that want to create solutions to the topic outlined in this report, can use the chart to find potential opportunities for action.