Hopefully, we have learned from our nation’s extended COVID-19 pandemic the importance of telehealth, licensure mobility, and appreciating health professions graduate students as collaborative partners. Zohray Talib and I currently co-chair the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) Global Forum on Innovation in Health Professional Education, and our members keep reminding us that undoubtedly there will be another crisis and thus, “What Have We Learned” from this experience can be applied to future COVID and non-COVID challenges. Issues include: Who are the workers in public health, community-faced health systems, in the social sector? What education, training, and competencies do they need? How can our workforce be strengthened and supported? How do we address provider, educator, student, and patient “burnout”?
Alex Siegel, Association of State and Provincial Psychology Boards director of professional affairs, reports that Wisconsin recently became the 28th PSYPACT jurisdiction, thereby representing over half of the nation’s jurisdictions. APA’s Jared Skillings: “PSYPACT will help improve the accessibility of our services to the public, and especially to rural and underserved communities – communities that really need our care. It also provides a way for psychologists to deliver services to patients who may not be able to leave their homes – like people with transportation challenges, disabilities, or concerns about a contagious virus.”
Looking to the future, Jared will be hiring a senior director for independent practice and a project manager for healthcare innovation. For those colleagues especially interested in administration and those potentially exploring unusual retirement experiences, we would suggest that ensuring that one’s licensing authority has the ability to designate a license in “inactive status” provides important flexibility.
Former APA President Tony Puente, former Robert Wood Johnson fellow and University of New Mexico President Bob Frank, and recent USU graduate Joanna Sells have been working closely with APA laying the foundation for addressing the potential for graduate student and post-doctoral fellow reimbursement on several levels (under state Medicaid plans, Medicare (with APA’s Alix Ginsberg), and health insurance benefits, for example). Not surprisingly, this has also been a topic of considerable discussion at our Global Forum by all of the disciplines. Mitch Prinstein, testifying before the U.S. Senate HELP Committee on behalf of APA: “It is absolutely critical that we are discussing mental health in schools, (and) that we are building into our curriculum social-emotional competence. We have the tools to build kids’ resilience. We just need the opportunity to be able to teach what we know to all those teachers and counselors and administrators, so we can help them to identify kids before they reach a moment of trauma.” He called on the Congress to authorize Medicare reimbursement for care provided by psychology trainees during residency, emphasizing that there simply are not enough mental health care providers and that there is not enough investment in science to use what we know to prevent mental illness. An important policy theme which former APA President Alan Kazdin has constantly stressed.
Forever the Visionary: “What I am describing is an approach that strives to get a jump on change, not just react to change while it is happening, or worse yet after it has already happened. Strategic resilience is a process of building an ingrained agility and flexibility that will allow us to change in evolutionary and incremental ways while avoiding the necessity of having to undergo major upheaval or cataclysmic shifts. And in that context, an important goal of strategic resilience is to deal with change that occurs around us, no matter how large, with ‘zero trauma’; that is, dealing with change without incapacitating stress and distress.” (Russ Newman, 2004 State Leadership Conference – Strategic Resilience for the Profession: Getting a Jump on Change).
“Yes, I think to myself, what a wonderful world.” (Louis Armstrong).
Aloha