Emergency! Quick, hire a consultant!
It doesn't take too keen a power of observation to note that Oregon needs major new mental health and addiction treatment facilities, and pronto. But the state's highly dysfunctional health agency can't quite see the light, and so they're going to burn some dollars on some outside experts to assess the obvious.
Oregon Health Authority (OHA) has hired Public Consulting Group (PCG), a nationally known firm specializing in public sector management, consulting and operations improvement, to conduct the study.
And wow, look at what we can't figure out ourselves and need them to tell us:
The study is required to:
- Provide an estimate on the number and types of residential care beds provided and needed.
- Analyze how behavioral health investments are balanced between supporting ongoing new capacity on an ongoing basis and potential added capacity.
- Analyze how behavioral health investments are influencing behavioral health outcomes.
The study will build on a 2022 OHSU-PSU School of Public Health analysis that identified significant service gaps in the state’s behavioral health system.
Study, study, study while nothing meaningful gets done, and addicts and other mentally ill people destroy their lives and wreak havoc on everyone else's livability. At least this latest exercise is supposed to be over in six months. No word on how much it's going to cost.
The study will inform the state’s five-year plan to expand behavioral health treatment and build a more accessible, effective and equitable system of care.
Oh, sure. And blah blah blah.
Hey Jack, remember the “Peter Principal”.
ReplyDeleteIt’s revived itself and dwells in the Oregon bureaucracy.
If it works, this may be a good thing to subvert Oregon’s inane “certificate of need” laws. If OHA publishes a report saying we need more beds, then the entrenched incumbents will have a harder time opposing new beds.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, those same incumbents likely will “shape” the report like La Mota shaped Shemia’s audit … “We have plenty of beds, we just need increased public ‘investment’ in existing capacity.”
Most of the clowns running Oregon into the ground should move their offices to a "camping site". If they live through a couple of nights, they will certainly be ready for real action. Problem solved.
ReplyDelete