About Us
The Division of Community, Population, and Public Mental Health is the newest division within the Department of Psychiatry. The largest group of direct care providers practice on the Auraria, CDOC, Ft Logan, and Pueblo campuses and move our mission and vision forward in the community. Here on AMC, our faculty, staff, and research professionals drive our mission forward through work with provider and community health advocate education and trainings. We are also engaged in telepsych through our UPL grant as well as other projects such in the innovative spaces of app development and VR. The CPP division is rapidly growing through expansions in the forensic space, community engagement, and collaboration with our partners at the State level to create a Learning Management System for healthcare across the state of Colorado.
In addition to the division's Mission and Vision Statements, we are guided by our CPP values found below:
- Partnership: We believe that collaboration with federal, state, and local organizations is key to providing comprehensive, high quality, evidenced based mental and substance abuse health services.
Innovation: We are committed to building and utilizing the evidence base as science makes services better, from prevention and early intervention to treatment and recovery.
- Advocacy: We advocate for exemplary public mental health policy to support individuals struggling with mental illnesses and substance use disorders, their families, and the providers that serve them.
- Humility: We strive to learn from the community members, providers, program leaders, and policymakers we are privileged to work with as well from our successes, and failures.
- Social justice: We challenge each other to recognize the richness of diversity, health equity, and inclusive- and culturally-competent practice.
Vision
A mental health system that is accessible, equitable, evidence-based, and excellent.
Mission
We partner with community-based and public-serving organizations in the provision of evidence-based clinical services, training, program evaluation, and research to improve mental health outcomes for Coloradans and beyond.
Research in CPP is varied, some of our projects include:
- Two NIH-funded projects focused on improving access to medication-assisted treatments for substance misuse treatment programs serving American Indian and Alaska Native communities.
- Using a Community of Practice approach, the primary objective of the "Work and Wellbeing QI Initiative" seeks to support several agencies across the country to integrate tailored workplace wellness initiatives and to assess their impact within each specific agency. A secondary, translational research analysis will 1) investigate whether a Community of Practice approach to implementing operationalized workplace wellness goals is an effective model to improve self-reported employee health and workplace wellness within the behavioral health sector, and 2) characterize the nature of wellness initiatives that had the largest impacts across agencies.
Our programs receive grant money from a variety of sources, including Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Behavioral Health Administration, and various private agencies. Some work includes Colorado Alliance for Resilient and Equitable Systems (CO-CARES), where the goal is to bridge the gap between health care workers and the resources they need to support their well-being and resilience and the State Tobacco Education and Prevention Partnership (STEPP) which focuses on tobacco cessation and health systems change
CPP collaborates with GME and DoP's Office of Education to support Forensic Fellows.
CPP provides direct clinical care at the following sites of practice:
- Health Center at Auraria: We provide mental health services including medication management in collaboration with MSU
- Colorado Department of Corrections: We provide mental health services including medication management to over 13,000 inmates at 16 facilities across the state of Colorado
- Colorado Mental Health Hospitals at Ft Logan and Pueblo: CPP faculty provide direct patient care at both of these facilities targeting forensic and civil populations of adolescents and adults. Faculty members provide both medical and psychiatric care.
CPP supports the department by providing infrastructure to faculty and staff engaged in community work, both nationally and in the state of Colorado.