Background and Statutory Requirements of the Community Plan
The Alcohol, Drug Addiction, and Mental Health (ADAMH) Board Community Plan has been a tool to assess community behavioral health needs, identify local behavioral health priorities, and to identify alignment to federal and state behavioral health priorities of each of Ohio’s fifty community ADAMH Boards. This prescribed planning process has required static, one-time plans that have made it difficult for many community ADAMH Boards to build dynamic and flexible plans that truly represented the needs and priorities of their communities. The planning process and template lacked clarity of purpose and needed a full-scale review to improve the use and usefulness of the planning requirement.
The new Community Assessment and Plan (CAP) process has been designed to better support policy development, strategic direction, strategic funding allocation decisions, data collection and data sharing, and strategic alignment at both the state and community level. This planning process balances standardization and flexibility as the ADAMH Boards identify unmet needs, service gaps, and prioritize community strategies to address the behavioral health needs in their communities. Included in these changes is an increased focus on equity and the social determinants of health that are now imbedded in all community planning components.
Based on the requirements of Ohio Revised Code (ORC) 340.03, the community ADAMH Boards are to evaluate strengths and challenges and set priorities for addiction services, mental health services, and recovery supports in cooperation with other local and regional planning and funding bodies. The boards shall include treatment and prevention services when setting priorities for addiction services and mental health services.
Historically, the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (OhioMHAS) has reviewed and approved the submitted plans and used the contents in various planning efforts across the Department. The plans were also added to the OhioMHAS website for public access. More recently, OhioMHAS has positioned the community plan process as essential for identifying local and regional priorities, priority populations and service alignment, local service trends, and service needs across the state.
Looking forward, OhioMHAS has redesigned the CAP to increase the importance, visibility, effectiveness, and usefulness at both the state and community level. This planning process is also designed to support stronger alignment between ADAMH Boards and the OhioMHAS strategic plan, and to support increased levels of collaboration between Boards and community partners, such as LHDs, local tax-exempt hospitals, county FCFCs and various other systems and partners. The new community planning model has at its foundation a data-driven structure that allows for local flexibility while also providing standardization in the assessment process, identification of disparities and potential outcomes. This redesigned planning process will lead to measurable improvements in mental health, addiction, and equity outcomes.
The community planning process will move to a three-year cycle, and this plan will cover calendar years 2023-2025. The ADAMH Boards will provide an annual progress report at the end of each year which will identify the progress made on the identified priorities and outcomes and allow for the identification of any adjustments made to the plan for the upcoming year.
Copied from ADAMH Board Community Assessment and Plan 2023-2025 Guidance Document, October 2022