Governor Beebe's Weekly Column and Radio Address: Reforming Arkansas's Mental Health System of Care for Children

Statement

This week, Representative Earnest Brown from Pine Bluff unveiled the details of his legislation that will provide much-needed reform in the mental health system for Arkansas children. It offers a roadmap for moving toward reform in areas where families, advocates, providers, and state-agency representatives can come together to find common-sense solutions.

I must first thank all those advocates whose tireless efforts and hard work went into making this bill a real option that will help Arkansas's children who need our support and our protection. Children, our most precious resource, are the future of our State, and they must have access to high-quality, professional mental-health care. While we have many well-equipped people working for the well-being of those young people who face special mental-health challenges, we can do better.

Our State spends a great deal of money to place many youth into full-time, inpatient care, when many would be better-served by interventions in their homes and communities, alongside families or caregivers. Going forward, we need to examine how best to incorporate Medicaid support, to increase accountability, and to move toward an outcomes-based system. But most of all, we need to make children and families full partners in decisions about their care or their children's care.

And how do we do these things? How do we best chart our course? We start by bringing together all the people with expertise in this arena as a commission to assess where we are and how we get where we need to be.

Improvements to our children's mental-health system should be built on the needs of children, youth, and their families. Furthermore, the State should take every opportunity to empower families to strongly advocate for their children.

This legislation increases local capacity to "care for one's own" through leadership development and flexible funds. Success will depend on our ability to work closely with communities, offering assistance and guidance about the ways in which the challenges of their children and families can be met effectively and efficiently. This legislation will also allocate flexible funding to support those mental-health services not Medicaid-reimbursable. This funding will help ensure that children, youth, and their families can access services in their communities based on needs—not whether the service is available or covered under Medicaid.

This legislation will also strengthen locally-directed networks to use public resources appropriately. This would allow interagency groups at the local, regional, and state levels to coordinate services—alongside children and their families—that help them stay in their homes and communities, with the fewest disruptions to their lives.

Beginning in May, Mental Health Awareness Month, my wife Ginger will begin a statewide listening tour with those families in our State who have children experiencing mental-health issues. This tour will give us the opportunity to work together, so that we can strengthen our families and address the needs of our children. Ginger will reach out to the families at lunches, brunches, potlucks, and other events across Arkansas, from Jonesboro to Texarkana, from Fayetteville to Pine Bluff, and places in between. This will allow us to learn more about where we need to go as a State, keeping the focus on children and families.

With all these pieces in place, this bill will provide Arkansas's children and families the necessary mental-health services they need to lead healthy, fulfilling lives. This legislation will move Arkansas forward toward a more inclusive, accessible, and accountable mental-health-care system. Join me in supporting this legislation to move our children's mental-health-care system forward.

Source