For Release: IMMEDIATE
Date: January 4, 2006

NC to expand community mental health services

RALEIGH – North Carolina has received federal approval to expand its public mental health services. By early spring, North Carolina Medicaid will cover a full-range of substance abuse services, mobile crisis teams, improved adolescent treatment, and community treatment teams.

“This is a critical milestone in our efforts to transform the public mental health system,” said Division of Mental Health, Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services Director Mike Moseley. “We have said all along that successful mental health reform is dependent on having the ability to provide for a range of community services. With this approval, we now have that ability.”

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which makes decisions on what services Medicaid can cover, notified North Carolina officials last week that it had accepted the new service definitions, allowing North Carolina to move forward with expanded mental health services.

Key improvements to services include:

• Providing a full range of substance abuse services: Currently, Medicaid covers only a limited number of outpatient and inpatient treatments. The change will allow Medicaid to cover detox services as well as a number of residential services of varying intensity.
• Crisis treatment: Mobile teams will go to the consumer who is in crisis and stay with him or her until the crisis is resolved, or the person has been successfully admitted or placed in another service.
• Community treatment teams: Medicaid will cover community treatment teams, consisting of 10 to 12 practitioners including psychiatrists, nurses, mental health professionals, employment specialists and substance abuse treatment professionals. These teams will work with consumers providing continuous, personalized and flexible care. These teams will go to the patient when they are needed, rather than having a patient come to an office or clinic once or twice a month.
• Improved care for adolescents: Medicaid will cover intensive family-based treatment that works with the whole family to address causes of serious antisocial behavior in adolescents. These teams will create individualized treatment plans that address issues like behavioral problems that cause academic difficulties, prevention skills that parents can use to help their children avoid a crisis, positive ways to relate to other adolescents or individual circumstances such as adolescents with both mental health and substance abuse issues.

The new service definitions will be in place by the end of March.

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