Institute for Integrated Behavioral Health

Program Overview

The Institute for Integrated Behavioral Health brings best-practice team-based care to ETSU Quillen College of Medicine clinics. The Institute is closely aligned with ETSU’s strong interprofessional training mission as well as it’s mission to engage in regional stewardship in the rural and underserved areas of Northeast Tennessee. Established in 2020, the Institute has built behavioral health into primary care-based residency training clinics within Pediatrics, Internal Medicine, Family Medicine and OB/GYN and expanded behavioral health access in Nursing and high needs community sites.

Why ETSU? Fellowship Positions Benefits

Aims

The Institute for Integrated Behavioral Health aims to develop, implement and evaluate a training and service delivery program that strengthens primary care and its workforce and serves as regional model for integrated care.

Objectives

1. Implement a progressive model of integrated care to improve patient health and experience;
2. Train health care providers in the biopsychosocial model, brief evidence-based behavioral interventions, and interprofessional practice;
3. Train behavioral health providers to grow the region’s workforce;
4. Conduct research that influences local policy and practice;
5. Collaborate with regional partners to become a regional capacity-building program.

• Video Transcript: Inside the Institute for Integrated Behaviorial Health at ETSU

  [Speaker: Dr. Matthew Tolliver]
  One of the exciting things about working in integrated care is that you get to work on a team, and so you get to help people in their time of need, but you also get to help your colleagues that are also working in that same setting. And so that's really a meaningful experience.

  [Speaker: Dr. Jodi Polaha]
  Our training program gives graduate students the opportunity to learn focused behavioral health interventions, which is a skill that can be applied really across any mental health career.

  In addition, we teach our students how to consult with medical providers and other kinds of health professionals. We teach them how to teach what we do so that they can be helpful to an interprofessional team, whether it's in a school, a mental health center, or what we hope, in primary care.

  The Institute for Integrated Behavioral Health was designed by Doctor Tolliver and I to fit training for behavioral health professions graduate students who are in wide ranging different degree programs across our organization right into the College of Medicine.

  So graduate students and behavioral health professions get to train alongside medical students, residents, pharmacy students, and all other kinds of health professionals in primary care.

  One of the best parts about our training program is that we've been able to include all behavioral health professions instead of siloing specific ones, and it's been really cool to see social work students, counseling students, psychiatric nurse practitioner students, and psychology students at different levels of training, all learning together in one place.

  [Speaker: Dr. Matthew Tolliver]
  Northeast Tennessee is a great place to live and work. For one thing, we have amazing world class outdoor opportunities around here, and we also have a tight knit culture and a really positive community.

  Our institute is very committed to building sustainable positions for our graduates, so that we can see the region with really high quality behavioral health providers who can take care of our community.

• Video Transcript: Student Experiences at the Institute for Integrated Behaviorial Health

  [Speaker: Katie Cheeseman]
  My postdoc year here with the Institute was worthwhile for me because it gave me not only the professional training, but the experience on site of taking my passion for mental health and addiction recovery and being able to meet people where they are in their doctor's office. And I really appreciate that modality.

  My postdoc year with the institute definitely set me up for success, not only in teaching me what I needed to know to land a job in primary care, but also in giving me career long support and a group of professionals who I can access as a resource and who really support the work I do in this setting.

  [Speaker: Luke Hornby]
  I think what surprised me the most about training with the Institute was just how integrated we are with the physicians and the other providers that we're working with. I mean, we're talking with them daily, multiple times.

  You're involved in the patient's care, The institute prepared me to work as a social worker by really giving me a diverse range of patients. I got to see patients from all walks of life, all different types of situations, and I think it can be really rare in a clinical internship to get to see a bunch of different presentations. And so getting to experience a lot of different things was really helpful to prepare me.

  And the stipend to was really beneficial. I wasn't sure I was going to be able to afford my second year of social work education, and so having that financial funding was incredibly beneficial.

  [Speaker: Frankie Cradic]
  The main thing is, is that there's power and collaboration and that working as a counselor, I can use my expert skill set to help a primary care physician or help a nurse create a more holistic treatment plan for a patient.

  And I really just find that there's power and working on a team that's probably been the biggest thing that the institute has made me realize is that there's power and collaboration, and that the counseling profession can be dynamic and we can fit in many roles into our community.

  [Speaker: Lee Gourley]
  The need that the institute field for me was in providing me really rich clinical experience. I got. I was very fortunate to be placed in clinical environments where I got to have a mixed patient population, and it was just a really rich experience that I'm not really sure that I would have been able to find otherwise for myself.

  I was fortunate in to be in this cohort with a variety of mental health disciplines. One of the things that we got to do that was pretty interesting to me, and also really helpful, was that we had social workers, counselor, therapist, psychiatric nurse, practitioner, psychologist. We had all these disciplines, we would have group sessions together.

  And when we would troubleshoot, like maybe a case study or something, for example, it was interesting to see the way that other disciplines, because of receiving other education, how they might try to like work with the patient to come at a solution that might be different than the way that I've experienced in the past, or the way that I'm being educated. And that also helps to inform me or give me an idea of how to work with these people in the future as well.

  [Speaker: Mara Sindoni]
  Having a supervisor on site was really helpful for getting, like, in the moment guidance and being able to ask questions when they came up and still being able to kind of have that feeling of being there independently, but knowing that the support is there if you need

  I think probably the number one skill is, is flexibility. I think I've gained a lot of skills throughout this past year. I think my, my number one would be communicating with providers and being able to come out of my shell a little bit and say like, hey, this is a mental health concern that I can help with and being able to, like, confidently do that.