G7 - Prevention in Public Mental Health Services

Public mental health systems face growing expectations to improve care for individuals with serious mental illness (SMI) while managing increasing clinical complexity, workforce challenges, and accountability requirements under Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic (CCBHC) models. Prevention provides a unifying framework for meeting these demands when it is intentionally integrated into population management, clinical workflows, and team-based care.

This session presents a practical, prevention-focused approach that applies primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention strategies across common behavioral health conditions. Participants will learn how to use universal and targeted screening to identify risk and unmet need, apply measurement-based care to guide treatment decisions, and monitor outcomes to ensure accountability at both the individual and population levels. The session emphasizes integration across conditions and levels of care rather than isolated clinical initiatives.

The presentation integrates continuous quality improvement methods and prevention principles into operational practice. Participants will explore how teams use data to stratify populations, identify gaps in care, monitor performance, and adjust workflows in real time. These strategies support compliance with CCBHC access, quality, and reporting requirements while also improving clinical outcomes and service efficiency.
Team-based care serves as the foundation for this approach. Psychiatrists, advanced practice clinicians, therapists, nurses, care managers, peers, and community partners share responsibility for engagement, treatment, and outcomes. The session places particular emphasis on tertiary prevention for individuals with serious mental illness who experience persistent symptoms, functional impairment, frequent crises, and high service utilization. Participants will review structured care planning, measurement-informed case review, proactive outreach, and coordinated management of medical and social needs as strategies to reduce preventable hospitalizations and improve engagement.

This session equips clinical and operational leaders with high-yield, actionable strategies to strengthen prevention, improve accountability, and achieve better clinical care in public and community mental health systems.