by Chris Hilburn-Trenkle
This article originally appeared in the School of Social Work 2024 Spring Impact Report.
One year after receiving a $4.5 million grant from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and Health Resources Services Administration to establish a new Behavioral Health Workforce Research Center (BHWRC), the University of North Carolina BHWRC is launching a new slate of initiatives to research and address behavioral health needs in the United States workforce.
Led by director Brianna Lombardi (third from right) and deputy director Lisa de Saxe Zerden (second from right), UNC BHWRC is one of nine federally funded health workforce research centers in the country—and one of two at UNC, along with Carolina Health Workforce Research Center—and the only one led by social workers.
“Never before with any of the national workforce centers had social work had a leadership presence,” Zerden said. “For the profession, it shows that we are an integral part of the behavioral health workforce and we understand the research needs and questions that surround the behavioral health workforce. It really underscores the importance of social work—to be researchers, to understand the connections between behavioral health, physical health, and community needs—and to doing this work.”
As the demand for behavioral health care grows, whether it be through the rise in opioid overdoses, suicide rates or mental health concerns, access to behavioral health care around the country has stayed at roughly 50% over the last 25 years—a rate which is even lower for addiction treatment services.
Through UNC BHWRC’s ambitious research portfolio, Lombardi and Zerden are hoping to change that.
“We want to increase the quality and access to behavioral health care, and the behavioral health workforce is an important part of that,” Lombardi said. “We try to push the needle a little bit farther to think about it, where it’s not just the supply but these other factors that are influencing the access to behavioral health care.”
UNC BHWRC spearheaded 10 projects in its first year (2022–23), which focused on topics ranging from care provision among vulnerable populations, to monitoring training of peer support specialists, to examining the use of telebehavioral health in federally qualified health centers.
One project involved examining racial disparities in the social work education pipeline. It was led by Zerden, Brianna Lombardi, Brooke Lombardi ’22 (Ph.D.) and School of Social Work faculty Todd Jensen and Orrin Ware.
“What we know about the bachelor’s in social work graduate profile is that many of them are persons of marginalized identities, persons of color,” Zerden said. “When you start going through the pathway of social work education, the master’s graduates tend to be more white and less diverse. Clearly something is happening in that pathway to master’s level social work education.”
Using the National Survey of College Graduates census, their team found not only racial differences, but also loan differences that proved to present a greater barrier for students of color deciding to pursue a graduate degree than for white students. Based on findings, the researchers provided policy recommendations designed to diversify the field’s educational pathway moving forward to help expand the behavioral health workforce.
For 2023–24, Lombardi and Zerden are leading seven projects, including studying the workforce providing school-based behavioral health care, the provision of perinatal services at mental health and substance use treatment facilities, and new educational pathways for behavioral health degree programs using the National Survey of College Graduates census.
Lombardi’s goal for the next five years is for UNC BHWRC to continue to conduct and advance research to improve understandings of and address behavioral health needs and quality of care, drawing on the expertise that the researchers have developed through their clinical, research, and educational backgrounds.
“For us in social work, we’ve always seen that there’s been this behavioral health need growing but I think [now] there is a national presence, a national understanding that we’re in a crisis. So I’m hoping that our center can be a place where our work can inform federal investments and state investments within the behavioral health workforce,” Lombardi said. “There are a lot of things that we can do.”
The Big Picture
- $4.5 million in funding from SAMHSA and HRSA over a five-year period
- In the 2022–23 calendar year UNC BHWRC spearheaded 10 projects for addressing behavioral health care needs
- Focus on providing research to understand and address behavioral health needs and quality of care
- Seven active projects for the 2023–24 calendar year
To read more articles in the School of Social Work 2024 Spring Impact Report, click here.
