With a new grant to help people who suffer from severe mental disorders and abuse drugs or alcohol find and keep jobs, Case Western Reserve University is setting the national standard in "evidence-based practice" (EBP) for treatment of patients with mental illnesses.

Case's Substance Abuse and Mental Illness Coordinating Center of Excellence (SAMI CCOE), a joint venture between the university's Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences and the department of psychiatry atthe Case School of Medicine, has been awarded nearly $1 million over three years from the Ohio Department of Mental Health to develop and evaluate a "Supported Employment Resource Kit" to assist patients with so-called dual disorders.

The SAMI CCOE program, which was established in 2000 as part of a statewide initiative to improve the quality of mental health care in Ohio, already has helped more than 20 agencies develop and implement Integrated Dual Disorders Treatment, an evidenced-based approach to treating individuals with co-occurring substance abuse and mental disorders.

With the new state contract for the Supported Employment Resource Kit, SAMI CCOE
becomes the first program in Ohio to provide training and technical assistance for more than one evidence-based practice, making it a national model for EBP implementation, according to Robert Ronis, vice chair for education and director of public psychiatry
in the medical school's psychiatry department, and co-director of the SAMI CCOE program.

"We think that with our strength in EBPs successful track record
we have the potential to become central to the center for the entire EBP movement," Ronis said. "We have already been approached by several other states who are hoping to replicate our experience-but our primary focus remains on the State of Ohio."

The center's newest grant comes from the Ohio Department of Mental Health, which receives funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service's Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration.

The Supported Employment Resource Kit, developed as part of the EBP movement for treatment of patients with mental illnesses, consists of curriculum guidelines for developing and implementing programs to support dual disorder patients by helping them find the right employment opportunity and then using a variety of strategies to help them stay employed.

"The idea of the program is that once a person is placed in a job created by an employment specialist who is part of the person's treatment team, we want to help them however we can, whether it be visiting them at the job site and providing coaching, meeting with the employer to solve problems or providing ongoing counseling," said Lenore Kola, co-director of SAMI CCOE, associate professor at the Mandel School and dean of graduate studies at Case.

Return to the online edition of the 11-20-03 Campus News.