The wurster, the better

Well, it has been a while since we last heard from CBHTF (Children’s Behavioral Health Task Force). Because of my disorganization, as well as my swinging into depressive/not-caring moods, I thought I missed an opportunity to comment upon the first draft of the report I worked on for the DPW (PA Department of Public Welfare). Why do I say this? Well, I received the draft on April 26 with a note to respond with any comments by May 1. Then the other day, I received the report that was sent to a bunch of people in the PA state department and appropriate organizations.

Any way, I decided to start reading the 91-page document yesterday and sent in some comments, even though they were late. I still feel that I am a part of this task force and will until the ideas and suggestions by us are accomplished by the state of Pennsylvania.

I will continue reading the massive document and submit additional comments where appropriate.

Well, we had our call. It went well. We all seemed to come together at the end. There had been some misunderstandings about the direction we had chosen to go in. But we agreed on what had proceeded. The final report is supposed to be done by Friday, April 15, 2005.

Before then, the parents on the committee are supposed to identify what our concerns are, what issues remain unresolved, and what we would like to see. At this point, we’ve had one comment, not from a parent, but from a consumer. A young adult (age 21) has been on our committee from the beginning but has only voiced his concerns now. Thank goodness because he represents a stakeholder group that we seem to have overlooked.

Certainly by mid-April, the CHBTF Transition committee will come to an end. We are preparing a report to submit to PA DPW. It has been a year since we began. However, it has been only withing the last several months that we have actually done anything. The DPW gave us a deadline of March 1st to prepare a report by. Then they extended this to April 1st. We are extending this due date a little because only now have we had a couple of teleconferences to discuss. We seem to be on a roll.

Out of the 40 or so original members, we have only had real contact with less than 10 individuals who have actually participated over the past couple of months. Although we were all very enthusiastic last May 2004, we lost our desire to participate on the committee. It’s understandable. Time does that to you, especially when you are not communicated with by the people who want this to happen. I really hope the DPW does a moratorium on this task force and tries to determine why we didn’t do as good as the Autism Task Force. I have my thoughts and will talk about them later.

I hope to publish the draft here within a couple of days. This is being prepared by the co-chair of our committee, Rick. We will need it for another teleconference on Wednesday, April 6, 2005.

I do want to thank now all the members of our committee. It will soon be the responsibility of the new responders committee to whom all of the eleven CBHTF reports will be given, to proceed and carry on. Best of luck to them.

We want to thank all those who attended the conference call. It was a very productive meeting. Thank you in advance for sending us email regarding the issues that each one of you brought up at the meeting. Once I get all of these, I will build the minutes of the meeting and send it out to the entire CBHTF/Transition committee of 46 members.

We had an hour conference call meeting today because we were pre-empted by Governor Rendell yesterday. Several documents were emailed to us concerning help and guidance that can be provided by OMHSAS. They were pretty much a list of things that OMHSAS can provide the DPW CBHTF as well as a list of protocols that we should use in holding committee meetings. Unfortunately only 4 of the 9 committees participated along with OMHSAS staff.

In going around the room, so to speak, it seemed like the committees had tried to be in contact with its members, but got sparse response. We in the Transition committee said we got about 50% response. It was suggested that this was good and we should move forward and not wait for more to respond.

The lack of participation by committee members was a concern. However, we were reminded to move on with those members who did contact the committee.

We talked about holding a facilitator conference call every month to keep up-to-date on things. There didn’t seem to be a lot going on with the Yahoo forum that was set up. There is a lot happening in the state and OMHSAS is going to be send us a monthly newsletter/email to tell us about these things.

I’m putting down my thoughts here to see if this would be a good way of communicating once I tell our committee about this blog.