Cenpatico Blog

Cenpatico kicked-off Mental Health Month 2011 this week in San Diego, California, where CEO Sam Donaldson and other Cenpatico staff are in attendance at the 41st National Council Mental Health and Addictions Conference.

Sam and other mental health organization executives took part in a panel discussion, “New Opportunities for Working with Managed Care,” on Monday. Panelists talked about the role of managed care in mental health. Talking points for the 90-minute question-and-answer session included:

• How do we improve consumers’ experience with care?
• How are we going to make sure that people have access to behavioral healthcare?
• How do improve healthcare outcomes?
• How do we make healthcare more affordable?

The 41st National Council Conference continues through today and features keynote speakers, including President Bill Clinton and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Administrator Donald Berwick, among other panel discussions and activities.

The 41st National Council Conference is hosted by The National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. Cenpatico is the official sponsor of all internet kiosks at the conference to link our name and services with technology and innovation.  For more information on the National Council Conference, please click here.

This entry is filed under News.

From feeling an emotional high of a personal achievement to the emotional low of a traumatic event, mental health plays a role in everything we do. This May, Cenpatico is proud to take part in Mental Health Month as we and other organizations bring mental illness into the national spotlight.

Mental Health Month has helped raise awareness about mental health in the United States for more than 60 years. Initially a week-long public campaign, Congress designated May as Mental Health Month in 1949 (American Psychological Association, 2011).

Cenpatico is also proud to recognize May 3, 2011, as National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day. Mental illness impacts family members of all ages, social classes and backgrounds. At Cenpatico, we believe that educating families and friends on the types of mental illnesses that impact children is a key to promoting good mental health. For additional resources on children’s mental health, please click on the links below:

National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI)

National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA)

National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day 2011

“Caring for Every Child’s Mental Health” Campaign

National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

Connect the Dots: Understanding Children’s Mental Health

Please be sure to check www.cenpatico.com as we deliver information and raise awareness about mental illness throughout the month.

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Cenpatico’s Division of School-Based Services’ Tammy Forrest has been named an Arizona Teacher of the Year by the Arizona Council for Exceptional Children (AZCEC) and the Arizona Council for Administrators of Special Education (AZ CASE). One of five Teachers of the Year, Tammy, a high school educator in her third year at Cenpatico’s Chandler Campus, was recognized alongside her fellow honorees at the annual AZCEC/AZCASE conference in Phoenix this March.

“Tammy is always seeking to improve herself and seeks out feedback about her classroom and performance, which is refreshing to see in a veteran teacher,” said Lorie Adler, the Campus Administrator for the Chandler Campus. “Tammy is invested in her students and their families and works with them to improve both the academic and behavioral potential of her students.”

Honored to be named a Teacher of the Year, Tammy says that receiving recognition for her work with children has never been a goal. Instead, her focus has been, and remains, to help her students reach their full potential.

“When the kids realize they are doing a lot of the things that the regular kids are doing, you see the change that takes place. That’s what it’s all about,” she says.

Tammy has worked with special needs children since 1996 after earning her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in Learning Disabilities. Originally from Ohio, she developed a passion for working with children in special education from a young age.

“In high school I was a part of [Future Business Leaders of America] and Future Teachers of America,” says Tammy. “I come from a small farm town in Ohio, and one of my placements was in a separate school for special children. I absolutely loved it.”

Following school, Tammy worked as a Behavioral Science Specialist in the Army before beginning her teaching career in public schools in North Carolina and Arizona. Ready for a new challenge, Tammy left the public sector and joined the team at ABA Chandler, part of Cenpatico’s division of School-Based Services.  Tammy’s experiences, knowledge and passion for working with children quickly began to rub off on her colleagues at the Chandler Campus, where she now teaches high school.

“Her flexibility and dedication to her profession and the well being of her students is evident all of the time,” says the School’s Assistant Campus Administrator Sara Mauricio. “Tammy continuously looks for resources that promote growth within her classroom and brings ideas forward for new and improved ways to better reach our students and school as a whole.”

Tammy takes pride in the ability to put herself on a level playing field with her students. She lets them see her mistakes and how she reacts to them so that her students can follow by example. Once that student-teacher bond is created, Tammy says, she begins to see her students reach their potential. That is the part she loves most about her job.

“I don’t feel I do anything that I wouldn’t do for my own child,” she says. “I love them, and I believe in them.”

This entry is filed under News.

This week marks a historic time in our nation’s healthcare history. One year ago this week, President Barack Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act. This law was created, among many reasons, to put in place reforms that will make affordable healthcare available to more Americans than ever before. Since its passage, the Kaiser Family Foundation has launched a website — http://healthreform.kff.org/ — aimed at informing the public about the many ins and outs of this law.

As a Research Specialist at Cenpatico, the KFF website is one of many resources I review on a consistent basis. Ready to see what new information and analysis the site would have this time, I found myself clicking on a general health reform quiz. The quiz, a short, 10-question exam, was designed to test the average citizen’s knowledge of health reform. (Click here to take the Kaiser Family Foundation quiz and find out just how much you know about the basics of health reform).  “I’m an average citizen … let’s see how I do,” I thought. The questions included: Will we have to buy health insurance by 2014 or pay a fine?; Will the law cut benefits to people on Medicare?; Will there be government panels to make end-of-life care decisions?; and other specifics of the law.

Before I reveal my results, I admit that I am by no means an expert on the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.” At least, I don’t consider myself an expert. Having worked in the industry for nearly two years, I felt I should at least have a general knowledge of the subject. Using no outside resources, I completed the quiz in about five minutes. Of the 10 questions, I answered nine correctly. Which one did I get wrong? Let me just say that no, health reform does not include government panels that will make decisions about end-of-life care for Medicare enrollees.

Once I had completed the quiz, a web page opened up that detailed my performance and compared it to the overall results of all other quiz takers. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, answering 9-of-10 questions correctly means that, much to my amazement, I have more knowledge of health reform than 97% of Americans. An even more staggering statistic soon followed – through February of this year, nearly one-third, or 33-pecent, of all respondents correctly answered between zero and four questions.

These results show that Americans are still struggling to understand the impact of health reform on both the industry and the individual. Working at Cenpatico, I have seen that health reform has already impacted the way we do our business and the way we have to think about doing business in the future.  More importantly, however, health reform is something has impacted or will impact nearly every citizen of our United States. As the health reform debate continues, the fact remains that the Affordable Care Act is law. That’s why it is imperative that politicians, government workers and public and private insurance companies alike continue to work together to inform the public of the ins and outs of reform.

Want to see how much you know about health reform? Click here to take the Kaiser Family Foundation’s quiz. For other great healthcare resources, click here to access Kaiser Family Foundation’s main website.

This entry is filed under Blog.

Cenpatico’s Ashley Gallardo was featured on this week’s installment of ‘Forever Families’ on Your News Now (YNN) in Austin, Texas. Ashley, 23, is a Foster Care Consumer Advocate whose aim is to help youth prepare  for life outside of Foster Care when they transition out of the system on their 18th birthday. YNN asked Ashley to share her experiences and talk about the desire she still has to become adopted and have a family she can one day call her own. To see Ashley’s interview with YNN, please click here.

This entry is filed under News.