NJAMHAA News Spring 2021

spring 2021 8 W hile NJAMHAA’s Practice Groups have evolved over the years, one thing has remained consistent: They offer excellent opportunities for members to network and to share ideas, experiences, concerns and recommendations that inform and bolster NJAMHAA’s advocacy. The key original group was the Public Policy Committee, which was created around 1994 by Steve Ramsland, EdD, MA, when he was NJAMHAA’s Board President and Chief Executive Officer of SERV Behavioral Health System. “The Public Policy Committee was successful for several years in getting cost-of-living-adjustment increases and regulatory relief. The biggest success was after the 2008-09 recession when, relative to other states, New Jersey didn’t cut mental health care funding that much. This was largely because of the presence of the Public Policy Committee and [NJAMHAA President and CEO] DebraWentz. We were well known with the Governor’s Office and State Legislature,” said Bob Davison, MA, LPC, President and CEO of the Mental Health Association of Essex and Morris, who was a NJAMHAA Board member and chaired this committee for several years. The Public Policy Committee is no longer a separate entity because discussions naturally were echoed and reinforced in Board meetings and NJAMHAA now hosts Membership Meetings, which give all members opportunities to discuss policy issues with the Board and staff. The practice groups also foster conversations on advocacy issues with particular groups of providers and other members, as described below. When Debra L. Wentz, PhD, took the helm of NJAMHAA, in 1995, she recognized that “a strength of NJAMHAA was in members coming together to discuss common challenges, debating what the policies should be and working out solutions. I thought it should go bottom to top and top to bottom, so I created a wide array of practice groups that engaged many people at all levels,” she said. At that time, the groups were the Children’s and Hospital-Based Committees, in addition to the Public Policy Committee. Longest Running Practice Groups: Children’s and Chief Financial Officers In the early years of Dr. Wentz’s tenure, the Children’s Committee primarily focused on the transition of children’s services from the Department of Human Services (DHS) to the Department of Children and Families (DCF). At that time, Care Management Organizations (CMOs) were created and mobile response services began to blossom, recalled Greg Speed, MSW, LCSW, currently Chief Integration Officer at Acenda Integrated Health, who had served on the Board and chaired the Children’s Committee for many years. “This was a major transition, not just service wise, but also in government. We were getting to know a whole new group of people at the newDCF, which went through multiple commissioners,” Speed said. The committee met with all of them over the years and dedicated their own meetings to prepare for discussions with DCF. Development of a children’s screening lawwas another priority of the Children’s Committee. The group wrote a white paper about children’s commitment laws and discussed the skill sets that screeners needed to work effectively with youth. They also drafted a children’s screening law, which continues to be a work in progress. NJAMHAA and its Members Gain The CFO Practice Group successfully advocated for flexibility in contracts and many of those provisions, particularly the ability to move money around in our budgets, live with us today. - Jim Cooney, MSW, LCSW, Chief Executive Officer, Ocean Mental Health Services and Former NJAMHAA Board Chair