**New Mexico SBIRT-2014**

New Mexico SBIRT is an exciting new collaboration between the New Mexico Human Services Department, Behavioral Health Services Division, the University of New Mexico Center for Rural and Community Behavioral Health and Sangre de Cristo Community Health Partnership (the entity that with the NM DOH implemented the SBIRT program in New Mexico under the first SAMHSA grant from 2003-2008.) 

The NM SBIRT team will work with health care partner sites to provide quality, evidence-based, and trauma-informed services while attending to the specific cultural needs of the state’s ethnically diverse communities.  NM SBIRT promotes the integration of primary health care and behavioral health care needs to address the highly prevalent issue of individuals at risk for or diagnosed with a substance use disorder.

The health care partner sites participating in the NM SBIRT Collaborative consist of two Native American  clinics, one urban and one rural pueblo site; two medical centers funded through the PHS Indian Health Services System and two local area hospital emergency departments. The populations served by these sites are predominantely Native American and Hispanic—the two groups in New Mexico identified with the greatest need for access to integated behavioral health and medical services. 

Each New Mexico SBIRT site is staffed by licensed behavioral health counselors (BHC), as well as peer support workers (PSW). The PSW’s role is to initiate the screens, provide a warm hand-off of the client to the BHC, initiate and conduct all follow-ups of the GPRA. The BHC’s role is to engage the client, whose screen indicates a need for intervention. They provide the brief interventions and determine when a referral to more extensive treatment is necessary. PSW’s and BHC’s, as necessary, also provide the client with the following: promote linkages to natural community supports; assist in a patient’s recovery and relapse prevention plan; locate and arrange for referral to specialty services; track outcomes and adjust treatment on an ongoing basis to determine if services have adequately addressed the patient’s needs; and coordinate care between primary care and behavioral health settings in an often fragmented system of care

One unique feature of NM SBIRT is that the SBIRT service delivery model has been expanded to include screening and interventions for trauma and depression. Seeking Safety and IMPACT are the curricula used to address such issues.  NMSBIRT behavioral health counselors have undergone extensive training to offer evidence-based brief intervention and treatment for risky and unhealthy alcohol and substance use, depression, and trauma through the use of Motivational Interviewing, the Community Reinforcement Approach, Behavioral Activation, Problem Solving Treatment, and Seeking Safety. All five models are employed in the SBIRT sites. 

Another distinguishing feature of NM SBIRT is the capability to provide behavioral health services with patients and on-going supervision and training for behavioral health staff through the latest Telehealth technology, therefore, increasing access to secure and easily implemented video conferencing. This feature is critically important for New Mexico, a state which is geographically large, the majority of which is rural or frontier.

NM SBIRT will also impact New Mexico’s progress in Health Information Technology through the use of electronic tablets for patient screening by the behavioral health counselors and peer support workers and testing their EHR interface and implementation by the newly developed computerized screening and brief intervention software.

Website: www.sdcchp.org; 

Contact Information:  Lisa Rivera, Project Director, NM Human Services Department, Behavioral Health Services Division; (505)476-9209; lisa.rivera@state.nm.us