Typically, Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) teams provide 24/7 community-based care to individuals with severe mental illness. For the second year, the Center’s two ACT teams also provided shadowing training for other ACT providers and administrators.
Shadowing provides an up close and personal look at professionals providing high fidelity and evidence-based care for actual clients in their homes or in the community and is an opportunity for administrators to work together.
“The Wake and Orange-Chatham ACT teams are excited to be able to serve as shadow sites for other ACT providers, across both North Carolina and now Virginia,” says Emily Clark, MSW, LCSW, team lead for the UNC Wake ACT Team.
In March, the Wake ACT Team hosted three staff members, a psychiatrist, a team leader and a nurse from a team in Fredericksburg, Va. for two days to provide consultation and modeling of high fidelity ACT practices.
“Our visiting colleagues accompany our staff into the field, on home visits, medical appointments, or wherever is scheduled that day. Shadowing staff are paired up with counterparts (team lead with team lead, nurse with nurse, admin with admin),” explains Clark. “They observe our daily team meeting and treatment team meetings when scheduling permits.”
Wake ACT also hosted ACT providers from across the state of North Carolina during the months of May and June, including teams from Morganton, Winston-Salem and Greenville and three regional program managers.
The Orange-Chatham ACT team, led by Kristin Lukasiewicz, MSW, LCSW, hosted and trained ACT team staff from North Carolina locations, Gastonia, Forest City, Wilmington, and Durham, and the Middle Peninsula Northern Neck Community Services Board, which covers five counties.
Lukasiewicz and Clark will travel with their respective team psychiatrists, Carol VanderZwaag, MD, director, Community Services at the Center, and professor of psychiatry and Carrie Brown, MD, associate professor, to Virginia to follow-up with two Virginia teams.
The shadowing training is a partnership and collaboration with the Center’s Institute for Best Practices, headed by Lorna Moser, PhD, which offers training, consulting and technical assistance for high fidelity ACT services in North Carolina and other states.