Webinar: CoE office hours: Addressing trauma, racism and bias in behavioral health service delivery

Addressing Trauma, Racism and Bias in Behavioral Health Service Delivery: African Americans, and other historically marginalized communities, continue to face disproportionate challenges around access to, and quality of behavioral health care owing to systemic racism resulting in significantly poorer mental health outcomes. These organizational and clinical practices, such as who we fund, how we prioritize care access and types of treatments offered are often times impacted by bias. These biases impact quality of care—for example more severe diagnosis without proper assessment for African Americans or undertreatment of pain and increased coercion in care. These care decisions can cause trauma, re-traumatize and add to cumulative historical trauma. This further perpetuates mistrust in systems of care and decreases African Americans and other communities of colors’ mental health supports despite overwhelming need. Reducing trauma and building resiliency requires direct sustained effort to address the systematic racism and bias that lead to poorer mental health outcomes for African Americans and other people of color.

Join us on Wednesday, September 30th from 2:00-3:00pm ET to continue the conversation from the recent webinar, Addressing Trauma, Racism and Bias in Behavioral Health Service Delivery. We will have an open discussion to share strategies and innovative ideas around addressing behavioral health access disparities and provider biases within your respective programs.