Mental Health Blog

Patient-Centered Mental Health in Pediatric Primary Care: One Physician’s Transformative CME Experience

• April 19, 2024
• The REACH Institute
• Uncategorized,

A family physician based in Missouri, Dr. Barbara Miller is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and has been caring for patients of all ages for over two decades. With a background in rural family medicine, Dr. Miller is very familiar with working in spaces with limited access to specialists. “And it was very clear in the work that I was doing with patients,” she said, “that mental health and chronic disease in general were the biggest burdens.”

As a primary care doctor, Dr. Miller shared that even the patients who do have the means to see a specialist often prefer to work through their concerns with her. “I’m the person they have a relationship with. They may not be willing or able to go see somebody else, but they’d be willing to allow me to help them. And I needed the tools to be able to do that.” This realization led her to The REACH Institute, and the Patient-Centered Mental Health in Primary Care (PPP) program.

The PPP is a 3-day course followed by 4 months of case-based learning calls. Dr. Miller joined a virtual PPP in February 2024 and was initially hesitant. “I actually looked for an in-person training because my experience with virtual continuing medical education has not been good; I really struggled with getting something out of it.” But she described her PPP experience as “far and away the most effective CME I have participated in.”

Since the training, she feels confident in addressing her patients’ mental health concerns in practical and effective ways. “I walked away with knowledge, but also, I felt like I could do something.” She came away with a set of tools and the peace of mind to utilize them knowing they are evidence-based and research-backed.

But her biggest takeaway? The training’s balance between knowledge and compassion. “The reason we’re there spending a weekend [in this training] is not because we just had the sudden desire to pack in this many hours of CME. It’s because there’s either a patient or there’s a group of patients that we really want to help.” She describes this as “engagement of both the head and heart”. The PPP highlighted both information and empathy in a way that Dr. Miller says will stick with her for the rest of her career.

To clinicians who are considering signing up for this course, she says “You’re doing the work anyway. Don’t you want to do the work with tools and knowledge to be able to make it easier and feel like you’re more effective?”

 

To learn more about The REACH Institute’s flagship training, Patient-Centered Mental Health in Pediatric Mental Health, visit thereachinstitute.org.