PHILADELPHIA – Penn Medicine psychiatrists were recently awarded the American Psychiatric Association’s Psychiatric Services Achievement Bronze Award for the Supporting Seniors receiving treatment and Intervention (SUSTAIN), a partner program with the Pennsylvania Department of Aging (DoA) to support elderly, low-income Pennsylvanians in managing their mental health care.
SUSTAIN was developed out of a growing need to support the state’s low-income elderly population and their mental health needs, which are largely managed by primary care providers. The program’s goal is to identify community-dwelling elders across the state who are at risk of poor health outcomes, including nursing home admission, and to support those patients and their primary care physicians to manage their mental health care according to evidence-based guidelines.
The DoA operates a database that provides real-time information about new prescriptions for psychotropic and antidementia medications for low-income Pennsylvania residents age 65 and older.
“This provided us the ability to identify geriatric patients with newly diagnosed behavioral health problems and their primary care providers across the state and intervene on their behalf,” said David Oslin, MD, professor of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Mental Illness, Research, Education and Clinical Center (MIRECC), at the Philadelphia Veterans Administration Medical Center. Oslin is the director of the program.
“We are happy to be a welcome, impactful presence for many of these patients and their families and are thrilled to be recognized by the APA for these efforts,” Oslin said.
Since 2010, SUSTAIN staff have engaged more than 4,500 patients and family caregivers in a range of behavioral health services.
The Psychiatric Services Achievement Awards recognize creative models of service delivery and innovative programs for persons with mental illness or disabilities. Each year APA bestows two Gold Awards—one for a community-based program and one for an institutionally based program—plus a Silver and a Bronze Award.
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, dedicated to the related missions of medical education, biomedical research, excellence in patient care, and community service. The organization consists of the University of Pennsylvania Health System and Penn’s Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine, founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school.
The Perelman School of Medicine is consistently among the nation's top recipients of funding from the National Institutes of Health, with $550 million awarded in the 2022 fiscal year. Home to a proud history of “firsts” in medicine, Penn Medicine teams have pioneered discoveries and innovations that have shaped modern medicine, including recent breakthroughs such as CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System’s patient care facilities stretch from the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania to the New Jersey shore. These include the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, Penn Presbyterian Medical Center, Chester County Hospital, Lancaster General Health, Penn Medicine Princeton Health, and Pennsylvania Hospital—the nation’s first hospital, founded in 1751. Additional facilities and enterprises include Good Shepherd Penn Partners, Penn Medicine at Home, Lancaster Behavioral Health Hospital, and Princeton House Behavioral Health, among others.
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