Elizabeth Landsberg, California Department of Healthcare Access and Information and Jessica Pitt, California Labor and Workforce Development Agency: Collaboration to Grow the Behavioral Health Workforce

Today we’re going to take a look at how America’s largest state is tackling one of the biggest challenges in the nation’s healthcare system: increasing the supply of behavioral health providers. As we’ll hear from our guests on this episode of WorkforceRx, heightened attention to the issue from California Governor Newsom‘s administration has led to more funding and a greater degree of coordination at the state level. “Our agencies and departments are coming together in ways they have never come together before to really collaborate and figure out how we can align and leverage resources, expertise, and opportunities,” says Jessica Pitt, assistant deputy secretary of Healthcare Workforce at the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency. Elizabeth Landsberg, director of the California Department of Healthcare Access and Information, calls out new data gathering and modeling initiatives that support the department’s goals of increasing the diversity of the health workforce and the number of providers in medically underserved areas. “The data allows us to see the race, ethnicity, and the languages spoken by the workforce. We're using that data to prioritize our efforts geographically and by role to address the largest shortage areas,” she explains. Join Futuro Health CEO Van Ton-Quinlivan for an inside look at California’s strategies for developing and diversifying its behavioral health workforce that include apprenticeships, increasing clinical placements for trainees, and integrating behavioral health into primary care practices.