UTC receives $2.4 million HRSA award to address behavioral health workforce needs in Southeast Tennessee

Hunter Hall is the home of UTC’s College of Health, Education and Professional Studies. Photo by Angela Foster.

The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is the recipient of a $2.4 million federal grant to bolster the pipeline of highly trained behavioral health professionals serving children, adolescents and young adults in underserved areas of Southeast Tennessee.

The four-year award was provided by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), a federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through its Behavioral Health Workforce Education and Training (BHWET) Program for Professionals. The funding supports UTC’s newly launched B-HIP initiative, an acronym for the project titled “Behavioral Healthcare through InterProfessional Training.”

Led by a six-member collaborative faculty team from the UTC College of Health, Education and Professional Studies, B-HIP reflects a multi-program, interprofessional approach to addressing regional behavioral health disparities. The program focuses on increasing both the number and readiness of behavioral health professionals trained to work in high-need and high-demand areas across an 11-county region.

UC Foundation Professor Elizabeth O’Brien, director of the University’s School of Professional Studies, is the lead PI (principal investigator) for the project. Other members of the collaborative team are:

Mental Health Counseling Program Coordinator and Counselor Education Program Director Kevin Doyle
School Counseling Program Coordinator Alexandra Frank
Master of Social Work Program Director Amy Doolittle
Associate Professor of Social Work Bethany Womack
School Psychology Program Director Amanda J. Hardin

“I think one of the things that we have seen over the last few years is the focus on interprofessional education, which means this grant and many of the new kinds of programs that we’re working on involve multiple departments that have skill sets that complement each other,” said Dr. Valerie Rutledge, dean of the College of Health, Education and Professional Studies. “Each one of them brings a unique set of background and information to the perspective that they’re going to provide.

“The combination of the programs are what you might find yourself working right beside in a workplace. Whether it’s in a health care organization or a school setting, the fact that you go out into these professions and you don’t work alone is something that this project is a perfect example of.”

Through the B-HIP project, UTC will collaborate with eight community partners to expand experiential training, provide learning opportunities and improve behavioral health outcomes. The region served includes counties that are either medically underserved or designated as having a shortage of mental health providers, including some with resident-to-provider ratios exceeding 3,000 to 1.

Dr. Elizabeth O’Brien

“To our knowledge, UTC has never received this type of grant for behavioral health, which makes it really, really exciting,” said O’Brien, a member of the UTC faculty since 2007. “We live in an area where we have a lack of mental health providers in general, but in particular for our rural folks, there is a real lack of opportunity and services for mental health care.”

B-HIP will engage students from UTC’s social work, clinical counseling, school counseling and school psychology graduate programs in hands-on, interprofessional learning experiences. Each year, 12 students will be selected for specialized traineeships that include placements in B-HIP partner sites, annual conferences, quarterly interprofessional simulation symposia, and enhanced mentorship and career development support.

“Part of this grant was being able to support our hardworking students,” O’Brien said. “At UTC, we work with a lot of first-generation college students who then subsequently become first-generation graduate students. This grant creates an opportunity to find them scholarships during that internship year when they really can’t work for pay because they’re working full time in the agencies that they’re serving.”

Other essential grant activities include the creation of a digital learning library featuring video-based training and tutorials, as well as simulation modules that focus on real-world interprofessional care scenarios.

The learning library, O’Brien said, will be accessible to all students across various programs—not just those receiving grants.

“We’re looking at strengthening the skill set in telehealth,” O’Brien explained. “Telehealth is not a replacement for face-to-face counseling, but oftentimes in a pinch, it is what our rural constituents need. This gives us another way to train our students.

“The learning library is something that we can build and keep and utilize for years to come.”

Additionally, the grant enables UTC to enhance supervisor training and expand the regional pipeline of behavioral health professionals.

According to HRSA, the BHWET Program is designed to improve access to behavioral health services by preparing students to work in team-based care models that integrate behavioral health into primary care and other interprofessional settings. A core goal of the program is to recruit a varied behavioral health workforce equipped to serve populations at high risk for trauma and mental health conditions.