Issue Brief: Pain in the Nation: Healthcare Systems Brief
How healthcare systems can help address the drug, alcohol and suicide crises.
Hospitals and health systems are on the front line addressing alcohol and drug misuse, providing or linking patients to health services and integrating behavioral health services across systems. As such, it’s critical healthcare system efforts are supported so they can optimize prevention and build a “whole health” approach.
This approach requires a careful, encompassing systems method–creating new programs without intentionally integrating the with and connecting them to other parts of the same system continuum cannot bring about as robust a change as necessary. Additionally, in some cases, without taking this comprehensive method, a solution could increase fragmentation and create more problems.
This brief focuses on how to support this approach by focusing on prevention and collaborations and partnerships that will result in enhanced behavioral health services.
Systems can and should be advocates for patients and ensure the resources commensurate with the challenge are quickly identified–and accessed.