The integration of mental health and primary care continues to be a major topic of interest, especially among community psychiatrists at the recent 2012 Institute on Psychiatric Services, held in NYC last week from October 4-7, 2012.
Dr. Lori Raney, a psychiatrist in Colorado, integrates primary care with psychiatry in multiple settings. She has not only brought psychiatry into the primary care clinic (often thought of as the "traditional" model of integration), she has also brought primary care into a community mental health clinic (sometimes referred to as "reverse integration"). Dr. Raney was a presenter at IPS last week. Read more about her work here.
With this sustained and growing focus on meaningful integration and collaboration between psychiatry and primary care, combined family medicine/psychiatry training is more relevant than ever. Graduates of combined programs are ideally prepared to be leaders in these collaborative care settings.