Welcome to the first video of the Promising Practices series!
This Promising Practices video series is for those who are involved with disaster planning,
response, and recovery and who seek innovative and effective ways of creating and sustaining
disaster behavioral health plans.
This series explains eight practices to help you develop and refine your plans.
Each video includes learning objectives that provide
a framework for the content you'll be introduced to within each topic.
The learning objective of this video is to identify the eight promising practices of
successful disaster behavioral health planning.
Developing and refining a disaster behavioral health plan
is a complicated and time-consuming process.
It's easy to skip steps or miss opportunities to innovate.
To ensure a successful planning process,
the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration
Disaster Technical Assistance Center, also known as SAMHSA DTAC,
worked with several states and disaster behavioral health experts
to formalize a set of eight practices to include in your plans.
So, what are the eight promising practices?
They are Plan Scalability, Partnerships, Financial and Administrative Preparedness, Plan Implementation,
Services Assessment, Logistical Support, Legal and Regulatory Guidance, and finally, Plan Integration.
Let's go through these one by one. The first promising practice is plan scalability.
For plan scalability, it is important that your plan appropriately anticipates disasters
of different types and magnitudes so that the plan can quickly be scaled up for large
and complex events and then scaled down again as needed.
When preparing for and responding to disasters, written instructions make information clear
and accessible for those who are unfamiliar with disaster behavioral health response
but who must nevertheless act quickly in a time of crisis. These action steps are often written
in the form of standard operating procedures, or SOPs.
The next promising practice is partnerships. Partnerships address proactive collaboration
with other stakeholders as a necessary, important, and critical step toward creating and maintaining
your disaster behavioral health plan. Stakeholders range from mental health and
substance abuse provider agencies; emergency management entities at the state and local levels;
law and public safety organizations; public health agencies;
voluntary organizations active in disaster; and academic institutions.
Promising practice three, financial and administrative preparedness,
identifies sources of financial support and funding throughout the whole plan.
This includes policies and procedures for preparing grant applications for programs
such as the Crisis Counseling Assistance and Training Program, also known as the CCP.
Another component of this promising practice is the staffing for a disaster behavioral health response,
such as team recruitment, hiring, organization, and communication with team members.
Promising practice four is plan implementation.
It is critical to launch an activation properly in the first 24 hours after a violent or traumatic event.
Your plan needs to include a description of action steps to specifically guide
the first 24 hours of operation following a disaster.
Promising practice five is services assessment.
It is important to understand the difference between traditional mental health services
and disaster behavioral health services. A good plan reflects the implementation of
a needs assessment to determine your community's need for services, and a process for providing
the entire continuum of services to people in need.
This involves envisioning how you may use all the different tools available in your disaster environment.
Promising practice six is logistical support. In the context of the disaster behavioral
health plan and response teams' logistical support, logistics are not just about "stuff,"
but about access. It is important for the state coordinators to understand logistics within
their state, territory, and tribe, and also to understand other potential support systems
that may have their own unique logistical processes.
Promising practice seven is legal and regulatory guidance.
You don't want to meet your internal fiscal, contracts, and human resources staff
for the first time during a crisis. It is best to introduce yourself before a disaster occurs.
The final promising practice is plan integration, which helps ensure that you can operationalize your plan.
You will need to identify who is responsible
for maintaining and updating the plan, develop a timeline for when the plan gets updated,
and create schedules for training and exercises around the plan.
We'll get into more specifics about how to implement each promising practice, and provide
helpful tips and examples, in subsequent videos.
This concludes the Introduction to the Promising Practices series. Thanks for tuning in!
To view an expanded version of this video, go to www.samhsa.gov/dtac/webinars-podcasts
and scroll down to the Promising Practices in Disaster Behavioral Health Planning series.
Established by SAMHSA, DTAC supports SAMHSA's efforts to prepare states, territories, and tribes
to deliver an effective mental health and substance use-related response to disasters.
SAMHSA DTAC services include:
Consultation and trainings on disaster behavioral health topics,
including disaster preparedness and response, acute interventions,
promising practices, and special populations.
Dedicated training and technical assistance for disaster behavioral health response grants
such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency CCP.
Identification and promotion of promising practices in disaster preparedness and planning,
as well as integration of disaster behavioral health into the emergency management
and public health fields.
For training and technical assistance inquiries,
you can call SAMHSA DTAC toll-free at 1–800–308–3515 or email dtac@samhsa.hhs.gov,
or you can visit www.samhsa.gov/dtac.
Before we conclude, we'd like to give a special thanks to Steve Crimando,
who contributed the original content for this video.