The Mental Health Center of Denver Sets the Standard

MHCD Receives a Request for Standards of Care for Serving Deaf and Hard of Hearing Clients from the State System in Georgia

We are proud of the work accomplished with the Daylight Project in establishing the Standards of Care for Deaf and Hard of Hearing. Here is a great example of that work.

Currently there is an active lawsuit in the state of Georgia which petitions the court to order the state to make behavioral health services accessible to D/HoH Georgians. Several similar cases have been successfully pursued in South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas and North Carolina resulting in those southeastern states having significantly improved their access to care. Its because of the vision of great leaders like Cliff Moers, Janet Woods, Charlie Smith, George Del Grosso and Carl Clark here in Colorado that we have taken a more systems transformational approach to creating access to care here rather then pursue adversarial legal remedies.

Dr. Barry Critchfield, who is a well recognized national leader in the design and implementation of mental health services for Deaf and Hard of Hearing, recently sent a request to the Mental Health Center of Denver asking permission to use the products of the Colorado Daylight Project and the Mental Health Center of Denver to build a system of access to care for D/HoH folks in Georgia.

As a national consultant, Barry Critchfield has consulted in several states on how they can improve their access to services including: Missouri, Utah, Alabama and others. Barry also is the author of the National Assn of State Mental Health Program Directors’s (NASMHPD) white paper on Meeting the Mental Health Needs of Persons Who Are Deaf which was published several years ago: http://www.nasmhpd.org/docs/publications/archiveDocs/2002/Deaf.PDF