Victor Armstrong
speaker
68 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2020
last heard Nov 2020
Victor Armstrong’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Hi, my name is Victor Armstrong, and I am director of the North Carolina Division of Mental Health Developmental Disabilities and Substance Abuse Services.
And I have been in this role for all of six months.
So I came in right in the midst of COVID pandemic.
But I come to this work after spending about the last eight years working in the hospital systems.
And I've worked for a large hospital system in Charlotte, North Carolina, atrium health, where I was vice president of behavioral health.
And of late, I'm really focused a lot on some of the disproportionate impact of health disparities on communities of color.
So
This conversation today is very relevant to me.
I think that we need to think about the changes that we would make programmatically, but also culturally and philosophically.
I think that some of the things that we can do programmatically would involve how we can better integrate care.
But I think where there need to be changes philosophically and culturally
is that we may need to rethink what integration means.
We've done some work within our systems on integrating behavioral health into primary care and primary care into behavioral health.
I think where we still have challenges are how do we integrate behavioral health into a community setting?
And I think that's where public institutions can play a role because we can pilot, we can build programs that would allow us the opportunity
to really build services that take into account not just the behavioral health needs and physical needs, but also how do we weave in the social determinants of health?
How do we look at integrating behavioral health into the faith-based community, into the YMCA, into communities where people live and congregate?
So I think that's one of the things that we can focus on.
As we're answering this question, I think we also have to look at the lessons that we've learned
from the COVID-19 pandemic and we have seen not only the disproportionate impact on communities of color, but I think we've also seen in the way that we've tried to respond to that impact, at least in North Carolina, one of the things that we have learned is
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