Several years ago, Jeff Reiter and I began work on the 3rd Edition of Behavioral Consultation and Primary Care: A Guide to Integrating Services (2025). Why? We felt it important to share what we’ve learned since our second edition (2016) – from you, all of you, including healthcare leaders, Behavioral Health Consultants (BHCs), Primary Care Providers (PCPs), and the people who go to primary care with the hope of improving their health. The Primary Care Behavioral Health (PCBH) model is growing quickly in the US and around the world! Successful expansion requires the use of a standard approach to workforce preparation, and our book offers guidance and practical materials to encourage standardization and implementation in an efficient and engaging manner.
Our book has six parts. The first is an update on the evidence for making this huge change to the scope and delivery of primary care services. We speak directly to leaders, with a hope of preparing them for a successful launch and scale-up. In the second and third sections, we provide information on specific roles and responsibilities of PCBH team members, tips for recruitment and hiring, and guidance on the skills and knowledge (core competencies) required for growing into new professional identities.
Keep reading . . . you’re about halfway through the pitch! In the fourth part of the book, new BHCs will find a treasure trove of materials for starting strong and staying strong. These include ways to introduce BHC services, engage your team, use a start-up checklist for the first year of practice, and monitor your job satisfaction. This important section also offers a great deal of clinical information with a chapter on “intervention” that introduces Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Focused ACT) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) interventions.
Across the globe, we have a growing group of advanced BHCs looking for materials to support their work as clinic and system leaders, program evaluators, trainers, and supervisors. Part five describes their practices and offers a variety of tools to support their work. The sixth section concerns “working the puzzles” of integrated behavioral health. Here readers will find a chapter on frequently asked questions about PCBH, and, in the last chapter, “ten tips” for successful implementation.
It’s a big book, and primary care is a big endeavor, and PCBH is emerging as a big part of primary care. But you don’t have to read the whole book. You can buy a single chapter and stop there. You can read the whole book and then use it as a textbook for your class (of mental health providers, nurses, family practice physicians, or in an interprofessional class). Or you can read it as an e-book when you have a spare moment in your practice. We wrote it with the hope that it would empower your starting and evolving in a new and better healthcare world, inspire your creativity, enhance your resilience, and help you promote health equity in your community.
There’s lots of free stuff on the book’s website: http://SpeakToYourDoctor.com, so check it out and continue your work – let’s make the world a better place.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
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