In six months, the agency is supposed to take over regulating the state's mental health and addiction treatment providers
With less than six months before Colorado’s new Behavioral Health Administration is supposed to take over regulating the state’s mental health and addiction treatment providers, people working in the industry are concerned that they’re running out of time.
“What happens if we miss our moment to do big, transformational work?” asked Dr. K. Ron-Li Liaw, chief of mental health at Children’s Hospital Colorado and a member of the BHA’s advisory committee.task force to address problems with treatment access and affordability Sen. Rhonda Fields, the Senate Health and Human Services Committee’s chairwoman and an Aurora Democrat, said she has concerns about the change in direction, though she voted to advance a bill extending the deadlines and allowing some programs to remain in place instead of moving under the BHA.
It’s not that the BHA hasn’t accomplished anything over the last year.
“We were hearing that the policies that they were putting forward or the ideas they were putting forward were not what people thought was going to happen,” she said. He called that approach “mystifying” but didn’t ascribe blame to Medlock or any other person. But he said he was glad that the governor’s office was “reasserting control over something that really needs to be successful.”
At this point, it’s not clear how oversight will work. Staff are working with providers and people who use their services to determine how to measure quality and enforce it, Gathercole said.The timeline to set up an agency was “exceptionally aggressive,” said Edie Sonn, senior director of external affairs at the Colorado Behavioral Healthcare Council.
The Behavioral Health Administration also has had to deal with turnover at the top. Its first commissioner, Medlock,Efforts to reach Medlock for comment on this article were unsuccessful, but she The announced departures included Gathercole, the BHA’s chief of staff and division director of strategy planning and engagement, along with several analysts and individual program managers and directors. Gathercole rescinded her resignation at some point during the five weeks between submitting the letter and her planned departure and continues to work at the BHA.
Racquel Garcia, executive director of the addiction recovery-focused HardBeauty Foundation and co-chair of the advisory group, wanted to meet with Barnes and another board member in late May, and said she felt ambushed by the requirement that the meeting be livestreamed. By law, an agency head meeting with two board members constituted a public meeting, but Garcia felt it undermined her goal of building relationships and rallied supporters to either speak or post slogans to back her up.
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