Some are in true fighting mode since cuts in their budgets have taken them by surprise and has created quite a cash crunch. However, some must sit and complain in virtual silence as their fights lack legitimacy. Why is that?
Many providers have been providing nothing more than a bed and breakfast approach to care. Some have been performing the equivalent of warehousing people, including our distinguished disabled veterans in unlicensed, unregulated homes. While skirting the rules of licensing these homes have ignored highly delicate needs of their residents including prompt emergency mental health services in the presence of serious behavioral decompensation.
Others have done the bare minimum in order to establish legitimacy as a long-term care provider of residential mental health services. Instead of working with a legitimate professional in consultative fashion to develop program policies, they simply buy them to get past licensing rules. They never make an intellectual commitment to them and as a result never operate a real program that is equipped to manage the complex needs of the mental health consumer of services.
So while these providers might be angry in the presence of cuts in mental health budgets that affect their checking accounts; their fight is really not a legitimate one…at least not until they have the freedom of speech that comes from operating a legitimate, person-centered program.
Read more about this in an 8-part series in American Care News beginning July 25th, 2009 including how lower quality programs can reinvent themselves through 6 easy steps. Subscribe today and let us influence your road to being the best long-term care has to offer.
