Dr. Maria Monroe-DeVita delivered a two-hour keynote presentation during an online webinar on “Current Trends in ACT Research & Practice,” with the St. Louis Regional Center of Excellence in Behavioral Health on January 19, 2021. Following the keynote, a panel of regional ACT experts discussed current trends.
Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) is one of the most effective community-based services for people with serious mental health disorders. Since its inception nearly 50 years ago, ACT has evolved and has needed to be responsive to changing times and service environments (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic). This webinar served to help ACT providers understand current trends in ACT practice as well as research that informs ACT policy and practices.
You can view a recording of the presentation and panel discussion here.
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Monroe-DeVita is an Associate Professor at University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. Dr. Monroe-DeVita’s expertise is in implementation and services research related to evidence-based practices for adults with serious mental illness, particularly the Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) model. She has served as the Principal Investigator on several projects with the Washington State Division of Behavioral Health and Recovery, including the development, implementation, and fidelity assessment of 10 new ACT teams, and several Illness Management and Recovery (IMR) and Integrated Dual Disorder Treatment (IDDT) pilots across the state. She is also in the process of developing and testing novel approaches to better serving people with serious mental illness. She received a collaborative R34 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to develop and pilot-test the integration of IMR within ACT teams and is working to better define and implement integrated primary care services within ACT. She is also the lead author of the new ACT fidelity tool – the Tool for Measurement of Assertive Community Treatment (TMACT) – which has been disseminated and pilot-tested in several U.S. states and countries. More recently, she has begun to work collaboratively with a team of researchers to better address staff burnout prevention and the linkage to client outcomes.