Integrating physical and mental healthcare: Facilitators and barriers to success

Effective and appropriate provision of mental healthcare has long been a struggle globally, resulting in significant disparity between prevalence of mental illness and access to care. One attempt to address such disparity was the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), 2010, mandate in the United States to integrate physical and mental healthcare in Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs). The notion of integration is attractive, as it has demonstrated the potential to improve both access to mental healthcare and healthcare outcomes. However, while the PPACA mandate set this requirement for FQHCs, no clear process as to how these centers should achieve successful integration was identified.

This research employed case study methods to examine the implementation of this policy in two FQHCs in New England. Data were obtained from in-depth interviews with leadership, management, and frontline staff at two case study sites.

Study findings include multiple definitions of and approaches for integrating physical and mental healthcare, mental healthcare being subsumed into, rather than integrated with, the medical model and multiple facilitators of and barriers to integration.

This study asked questions about what integration means, how it occurs, and what factors facilitate or pose barriers to integration. Integration is facilitated by co-location of providers within the same department, a warm hand-off, collaborative collegial relationships, strong leadership support, and a shared electronic health record. However, interdisciplinary conflict, power differentials, job insecurity, communication challenges, and the subsumption of mental health into the medical model pose barriers to successful integration.