2024 Psychiatric Service Awardees Honored for Innovative Service Programs

Three innovative programs focusing on building health care integration and infrastructure, suicide prevention, and primary care psychiatry received APA’s 2024 Psychiatric Services Achievement Awards.

Since 1949, the Psychiatric Services Achievement Awards have recognized creative models of service delivery and innovative programs for people with mental illness or disabilities. The award selection committee members were Gerard Gallucci, M.D., Laura Halpin, M.D., Jules Ranz, M.D., and Michael Sernyak, M.D.

This year’s awardees are the following:

Gold Award ($3,500)

Mental Health Offenders Program (MHOP)

The primary goal of MHOP is to break the cycle of repeated arrests for individuals with mental illness and provide the wraparound support they need to successfully reintegrate into the community. Through the MHOP program, participants receive case management, psychiatric and medical treatment, therapy, housing assistance, disability processing assistance, and peer specialist services. In 2022 alone, 75.9% of the participants were experiencing homelessness, but after acceptance into MHOP, 89.7% obtained permanent housing. In addition, community costs of participants dropped from $67,602 in 2022 to $26,992 after acceptance into the program.

Silver Award ($2,000)

Enhanced Treatment & Recovery (EnTRy) Program

EnTRy is a wraparound innovation derived from an evidence-based, time-limited model for early psychosis. EnTRy uniquely offers large-scale and time-unlimited care, serving people with serious mental health challenges. EnTRY is located in a racially and ethnically diverse Brooklyn community at a Federally Qualified Health Center (FQHC) formally attached to an academic medical center. It supports recovery with combined traditional services, home outreach, hospital inreach, family support, and facilitation of employment and education. A tight-knit team of professionals, paraprofessionals, and peer specialists also offer low-threshold access to the FQHC’s substance misuse and general health care services.

Bronze Award ($1,000)

North Carolina Statewide Telepsychiatry Program (NC-STeP)

The NC-STeP was created in 2013 with a vision that individuals who are experiencing an acute behavioral health crisis and come to an emergency department (ED) will receive timely psychiatric treatment through the statewide network in coordination with available and appropriate clinically relevant community resources. The program was created to promote equitable access to evidence-based mental health care, initially starting in ED settings and then expanding to the community-based primary care settings in underserved and rural counties. The program has reduced ED wait times for psychiatric patients, avoided unnecessary psychiatric hospitalization, and contributed to significant cost savings to the state.

Since its inception, the program has completed over 57,000 psychiatry assessments and has saved the state over $50 million by preventing unnecessary psychiatric hospitalizations. A third of the patients served by the program had no insurance coverage, and about 46% of patients were covered by Medicaid and Medicare. East Carolina University’s Center for Telepsychiatry, where the program resides, submits quarterly reports regarding specific performance measures. These can be publicly accessed here. ■