Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Mental Health topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Mental Health Advisory Committee seeks $603,000 to expand peer workforce and bed registry
Summary
The county Mental Health Advisory Committee asked the council to fund pay-and-benefit increases for peer support workers (estimated $603,000), push a bed-registry dashboard for behavioral-health capacity, and pursue Medicaid coverage expansion for school-based services.
Elizabeth Nelis, representing the Mental Health Advisory Committee, told the Health and Human Services committee that the county needs targeted budget investments to expand the peer-support workforce, improve crisis response capacity and reduce disparities.
Nelis said peer specialists — family peers, adult peers and youth peers — provide front-line support across settings from emergency departments to courts and schools but remain underpaid. "The estimated cost for this request is $603,000," she told the committee as a baseline figure to bring peer compensation and benefits closer to national norms.
The committee also urged expanded use of an active behavioral-health hospital coordination dashboard (an "active bed registry") to identify real-time bed availability across systems and to reallocate funds toward programs that directly address mental health and substance use outcomes. Nelis pushed for county partnerships to accelerate state-level Medicaid changes that would allow schools and community providers to bill for behavioral-health services.
Commission on Health chair Dr. Gabriela Lehi echoed the call for better perinatal and maternal supports, citing county data that Black women in Montgomery County were three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than White women in 2022; the commission recommended expanding the perinatal workforce and home-based interdisciplinary teams.
Follow-up: Committee members asked for data clarifying how many peer positions exist now, the expected number of positions covered by the $603,000 request, and operational plans for an active bed registry. No formal vote or budget allocation occurred during the hearing.
