MEETING MINUTES - NOVEMBER

Participants: Thank you to those of you that attended the committee meeting today:
Paige Prentice, Susan Ohanesian, Alexis Gadsden, Karen Carlini, Anastasia Ancoudinova, Maria Morris-Groves, Michelle Patnode, Naomi Weinstein, and Robert Anderson

List of Attachments:

• Federal Guidance to States Questionnaire
• New York State Subgroups for Service Standards (AKA outline for guidelines for women’s svc)
• OASAS list of programs in NYS that define themselves as providing women specific svc’s – (**it would seem there are providers NOT on this list that do svc women)

Content:

• 2011 is a refocusing year for this committee and we will begin with examining the women’s services available in NYS…what we have, what we need and how to close that gap. In the face of healthcare reform and a very tough economy, we need to be the convincing voice for women’s services to ensure adequate access and high quality.

• Many months ago we began an initiative in collaboration with OASAS to develop guidelines for services for women and children. The work on this stalled and we need to pick it back up. As an overview, the proposed guidelines (attached) for Family Centered Treatment Services for Women and their Children included the following 5 components (and each of the components has elements and I have included an update on where we are to date on completing these):

• Clinical Services –
• 4 elements complete – Outreach, Engagement, Screening and Assessment, Related to this grouping you will also find a LSB on Clinical Supervision
• Physical Health and Mental Health
• no work has been done – related to this group is our COD Task Force Recommendations
• Children and family Services
• 3 elements completed and a 4th started
• Clinical Support Services
• No elements completed
• Recovery Support Services
• All elements completed

• The following timeline has been proposed to complete the above guidance document:
• December/January – Identify new members for the Workgroup
• Maria to provide a list of self identified Women’s and Women and Children’s Programs (attached)
• Paige/Maria/ Susan – to send an email out to all programs inviting them to help finish up the Practice Guidelines/Standards
• Maria/Consultant – To develop a summary of where we are with the Guidelines/Standards and a summary of how they are being used in other States
• January/February – Begin Monthly 2 hour calls to finish Guidelines/Standards
• April – Draft Guidelines sent out for Review
• May/June – Meeting with Providers to finalize document and introduce the concept of self-assessment

• Federal survey (attached) to use as guide for creating our own survey (is 110 pages long!!) – needs to be reviewed and modified to fit our needs

• Need to identify which program in NYS treat women and what evidence base or promising practices they use. Maria provided the list attached but there are program that svc women not included on the list.
• Naomi Weinstein and Michelle Patnode volunteered to identify more programs and include on the list (what’s going on state wide?)
• Naomi Weinstein and Michelle Patnode volunteered to create a brief survey for programs to report on the EB or promising practices they use

• Concern regarding threat to residential programs due to status of block grants – this committee needs to get a statement out to providers to mobilize them into action and get involved – Paige, Alexis and Susan will do by next meeting

• Position paper to be developed for NYS transition team – include 2-3 critical items for women’s svc in NYS – Paige and Susan to do by next meeting

• Naomi requested announcement – Child welfare leadership conference is Nov 30th – please contact her with questions or if you wan tot participate
• Naomi’s email - nweinstein@phoenixhouse.org

• To accomplish this work we need the participating of everyone on the committee and those not yet on the committee…willing and able recruits accepted:-)