Background
LA County is a place of rich diversity, but also of great mental health inequities. Created in 2019, the partnership between LA County Department of Mental Health (DMH) and the UCLA Hispanic Neuropsychiatric Center of Excellence (HNCE) responds to the ongoing and imminent need for training linguistically and culturally competent mental health providers and frontline community first responders to attend to the unique mental health and neuropsychological functioning needs of Latino/a, Black, Indigenous and other Communities of Color.
Goals
Our efforts aim to enhance the wellbeing of Los Angeles County by building the necessary expertise to assess and respond to the mental health and neuropsychological needs of underserved and marginalized populations.
Services Provided
The HNCE provides an academic pipeline training program for mental health professionals, as well as, professional development within the existent LACDMH workforce, through evidence-based trainings, targeted consultation, and professional mentoring. Additionally, the HNCE training programs are designed to improve community mental health and wellbeing at the grassroots level by engaging local Health Promoters and faith-based and community-based organizations (i.e., FBOs and CBOs).
Educational tools and curricula designed by HNCE are helping the county workforce to build Bilingual/Bicultural formal assessment capacity and to strengthen community mental health relationships with CBOs and FBOs in order to decrease the mental health and neuropsychological burden of COVID-19, as well as, to support grassroots efforts with Bilingual/Bicultural mental health promoters in the community.
Programs
• Pipeline Postdoctoral Training Program in Bilingual and Bicultural Neuropsychology
• Neuropsychologically-Informed Bilingual Social Work Training Program
• Bilingual/Bicultural Mental Health Promoter Program inclusive of Psychological First Aid and use of digital platforms
• CBO and FBO Psychological First Aid in the Time of COVID-19
• Grief, Recovery, and Resilience Building for Diverse Mental Health Professionals
• Telehealth Psychological Services in the Time of COVID-19
• Caregiver and Older Adult Support Group curriculum and deployment partnered with LACDMH GENESIS
Audience
The HNCE engages a range of mental health professionals with live, interactive training, including both current LACDMH employees and pipeline trainees, as well as, community partners and peer counselors, who seek to better serve the unique cultural and linguistic mental health needs of Black, Latino and other marginalized communities within LA County.