CO Division of Mental Health

by Curt H Drennen, PsyD, RN
Mental Health Disaster Response Coordinator
Colorado Behavioral Health Services

The Colorado Division of Mental Health was activated by the Colorado Division of Emergency Management to be on site at the former Lowery Air Force Base to provide behavioral health support to the evacuees and the responders providing medical, housing and individual services. As we activated our efforts, several other agencies were activating theirs as well, including the Mile High Chapter of the American Red Cross, Colorado Organization for Victim Assistance and several faith based and professional organizations.

At one point in time, we had approximately four volunteers for every evacuee. It is events like this that highlight our need to develop an over-arching structure to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of our response efforts. We have a broad range of resources and when the community is in need, there is no limit to those who come to lend a hand. Unfortunately, we have often had systems that were at odds with each other, having different philosophies, different organizational structures, different intervention technologies and different expectations of who should be doing what, when and where. These differences negatively affect our ability to achieve our goal of supporting those impacted by trauma.

The Colorado Division of Mental Health’s Disaster Response and Planning Workgroup began hosting the Mental Health Disaster Response Planning Council in order to address these issues. A group of 65 professionals from across the state had our first meeting on December 19, 2006 at Four Mile Historic Park in Denver Colorado. This group committed to come together every other month for the next 6 to 9 months to develop a working structure for behavioral health disaster response. Initial work included developing 6 sub committees (Command, Training and Credentialing, Communications, Resource Development, Response Team Development, and Deployment/Response Protocols).

We expect that there will be some difficulty with this process and yet we expect the outcomes of this process will result in stronger working relationships across response agencies and organizations, greater trust and improved effectiveness in the field. We identified our vision as “An inclusive, collaborative and cooperative model of mental health disaster response” with the following five goals:

1. Identification of missing partners with the purpose of including them in the process,
2. Adoption and adaptation of the Incident Command System for behavioral health response,
3. Development of true partnerships across agencies throughout the system for behavioral health disaster response, including formal Memorandums of Understanding and Mutual Aid Agreements,
4. Development of communication systems that are inclusive and redundant, and
5. Development of a protocol document that can be utilized by the larger system as well as a template for regional, county and city/town partnerships for behavioral health disaster response.

While we have a long way to go to achieve our goals, we expect that this effort will pay dividends for years to come. The results of this effort should be greater collaboration and cooperation, more effective deployments that utilize our human resources effectively and efficiently, and a greater sense of community between disaster events. Stay tuned. I hope to be able to report our areas of progress in a few months.