Integrated Behavioral Health Certificate

Are you interested in...

Impacting the behavioral and medical health outcomes for thousands of patients?

Delivering evidenced-based interventions in a transdisciplinary team?

Opening up future opportunities for employment and leadership in primary care settings by investing in training and certification through a high-ranking university?

Then Integrated Behavioral Health (IBH) might be for you! This program is open to practitioners, such as social workers, LPCs, nurses, physicians and psychologists, and current graduate students.

Picture this…

• Billy comes to the clinic for allergies. The behavioral health professional takes a few minutes before the physician comes into the exam room to get acquainted with the patient.  During that time she assesses that the patient is currently psychotic due to cessation of medication for bipolar disorder.  
• 16 year-old Ronaldo came in to see his primary care physician (PCP)  for a school physical.  He mentions that he is slightly down.  The PCP has to attend to 45 minutes worth of other medical needs to have ethically completed the physical.  While the PCP sees her next patient, the behavioral health professional engages the patient in a more thorough mental health exam.  The patient endorses suicidal ideation, owns a gun, and has attempted suicide in the past.The patient is subsequently assessed at high risk for suicide risk and transported to the mental health crisis center.  

What is Integrated Behavioral Health in Primary Care?  

For many Americans, primary care physicians are the de facto mental health care providers because of the inaccessibility and cost of specialty mental health care (Regier et al., 1993). However, increasing workloads for physicians make it difficult for them to attend to mental and behavioral health in addition to acute and chronic medical needs. IBH in primary care responds to this by bringing behavioral health professionals into the primary care environment, and having them work alongside physicians to attend comprehensively to patients’ needs.

The Need

As the IBH model in primary care continues to grow quickly, the opportunity for employment has outpaced the number of trained providers, creating a workforce gap and a threat to model fidelity.

For example, the IBH model was originally developed to utilize psychologists. However, there are a shortage of licensed psychologists (for example, in Texas there are 47,000 people to 1 psychologist). Therefore, the model has started to include masters-level trained behavioral health professionals such as social workers and LPCs. 

Program Goal

The goal of this certificate training program is to equip clinicians to work at the highest level of their license in the unique context of primary care, therefore increasing access to behavioral health services for the patients who most need services.

IBH Certificate

The training program will provide content and skill development in the following:

• Professional roles in Integrated Behavioral Health
• Ethics of transdisciplinary care
• Treatment considerations for patients with chronic medical concerns
• Behavioral health assessment and intervention in primary care
• Psychopharmacology and other pharmacological considerations
• Brief CBT in the primary care setting
• and more!

There are four sessions offered from January to April. The first is online. Upon completion of three of the four sessions, students will receive their certificate.

16 CEUS are available for each course for social workers and LPCs.  For the online course 3 of the 16 CEUs meet the requirement for social work ethics.

For more information about this certificate program, please email Becky Scott at Becky_Scott@baylor.edu