NatCon2024

This April, PRISM’s Sarah Bernes, Lead Training and Implementation Specialist, and Karla Metzger, Program Manager, presented at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing’s NatCon 2024. NatCon is a multi-day event connecting healthcare professionals from all over the country for the largest mental health and substance use conference. This year’s conference was held in St. Louis, Missouri April 15-17. 

Based on PRISM’s more than a decade of experience in the Collaborative Care Model, their presentation, Pivoting from Pitfalls to Prosperity: What to Avoid for Successful Collaborative Care Implementation, provided best practices for implementing collaborative care with long-term sustainability in mind. Bernes and Metzger also partnered with two additional collaborative care experts for this presentation, Virna Little, Psy.D. and Laura Leone, D.S.W. Dr. Little is the co-founder of Concert Health and Zero Overdose. Her specialties lie in integrating primary care and behavioral health, developing sustainable integrated delivery systems, and suicide prevention. Dr. Leone is a consultant for the National Council for Mental Wellbeing and has been working in the integrated health field for 25 years. Her focus is on bidirectional integration, evidence-based practices, mental health, organizational change, and systems improvement. 

Together, they shared their collective collaborative care knowledge and experience, educating those new to the model and its many benefits. Attendees left this presentation with a deeper understanding of how to leverage effective, evidence-based practices and avoid common pitfalls, ensuring positive outcomes for patients and providers. 

To learn more aboutNatCon, or to view the full lineup of presentations given, click here.