NYC Health + Hospitals has seen significant gains in its behavioral health workforce since implementing a targeted strategy and several initiatives, Omar Fattal, MD, system chief of behavioral health, said. As the nation’s largest municipal health system, it has prioritized workforce investment as a central component of expanding access to behavioral healthcare services.
Dr. Fattal discussed why investing in the workforce is essential to achieving results on
an episode of the “Becker’s Behavioral Health Podcast.”
Note: This is an edited excerpt.
Question: What is the one mistake health systems consistently make when trying to fix workforce challenges?
Dr. Omar Fattal: One of them is the cliche of “walk the walk.” If you’re really concerned about the workforce and if you truly believe that access is workforce and workforce is access — without a workforce, you truly do not have any services — then you have to show that you believe in it. Showing that you believe in something goes beyond saying it. It involves having people dedicated to doing this work, financial resources, and programs that are supporting this work. Connected to that is planning ahead.
One thing that I’ve seen a lot in the past is business plans or programs that barely have any money invested in them for any overhead or any staffing. You look at the budget and it’s all going to salaries and staffing, or a little bit to capital or to some minor overhead expenses. But the question is: Where is the money in the budget in the first place, towards recruitment, professional development and retention? That should be baked in from the beginning. If I’m going to have a program that depends on hiring 50 people or 100 people, I need to plan ahead and factor in money from the beginning. It’s going to cost me a little bit of money to be able to recruit those people. That’s something that we changed. We started baking in allocation for these activities from the beginning so that we can find the resources to do them.
The last one is collaboration. You can’t do anything without collaboration. I would underscore collaboration with finance and collaboration with human resources — true collaboration that involves partnership, being on the same page and planning ahead. A lot of the mistakes involve waiting for approval 10 steps down the line and then someone saying, “Well, I didn’t know about this.” That is the most common mistake: people finding out very late. What we’ve done, in our case, is bring everyone to the table from the beginning. At the beginning of any initiative, bring in all the stakeholders — human resources and finance — and walk through it together. Make sure everyone is on the same page and in agreement. Then you go through the steps of implementation and it makes everything go smoother. It’s still going to be challenging, but it makes it easier.
At the Becker's Fall Behavioral Health Summit, taking place November 4–5 in Chicago, behavioral health leaders and executives will explore strategies for expanding access to care, integrating services, addressing workforce challenges and leveraging innovation to improve outcomes across the behavioral health continuum. Apply for complimentary registration now.
