Location: Poughkeepsie,NY, USA
Are you looking to be a part of delivering improved mental health services to the State of New York? Become part of a team of passionate professionals and begin a rewarding, life-long career in public service. The State of New York offers unmatched benefits, individual support, and career mobility for motivated individuals.
Who We Are: New York State has a large, multi-faceted mental health system that serves more than 700,000 individuals each year. The Office of Mental Health (OMH) operates psychiatric centers across the State. OMH also regulates, certifies, and oversees more than 4,500 programs, operated by local governments and nonprofit agencies.
What We Stand For: The Mission of the New York State Office of Mental Health is to promote the mental health of all New Yorkers, with a focus on providing hope and supporting recovery for adults with serious mental illness and children with serious emotional disturbances. Applicants with lived mental health experience are encouraged to apply. OMH is deeply committed to supporting underserved individuals, organizations, and communities. To this end, OMH is focused on implementing activities and initiatives to reduce disparities in access, quality, and treatment outcomes for underserved populations. A critical component of these efforts is ensuring OMH is a diverse and inclusive workplace where all employees' unique attributes and skills are valued and utilized to support the mission of the Agency. OMH is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer.
What We Offer:
• NYS pension and retirement programs
• Annual cost of living and performance advance increases
• Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision plans
• Flexible spending accounts for health and dependent care
• Paid time off, including thirteen paid holidays per year, and paid personal leave, vacation leave, and sick leave
Job Responsibilities:
OMH's Division of Forensic Services, Diversion Center is looking for highly motivated and organized individuals who are able to work well both independently and as part of a team, and enjoy a busy, challenging and creative work environment. The Diversion Center's mission is to support jurisdictions in the development, implementation, evaluation and replication of initiatives to the reduce arrest and incarceration of persons with serious mental illness (SMI). The general services provided by the Diversion Center are the assessment of local resources, current practices, and gaps in services through sequential intercept mapping; researching, training and technical assistance for the identification and diversion of justice-involved mentally ill individuals from incarceration; and researching, training and technical assistance to develop and sustain Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) programs in communities throughout NYS.
The Aligning to Build Lasting Engagement (ABLE) team is a new initiative for the Diversion Center. The ABLE team will focus on individuals known to cycle through shelter, hospitals, jails, and prisons. This team will be responsible for establishing and monitoring data shared by law enforcement, correctional entities, hospitals, and providers to facilitate connections to services, including housing, and will collaborate with OMH regional field offices, local mental health providers, local law enforcement agencies, and other community stakeholders. To most effectively implement this initiative, DFS is establishing a Forensic Evaluation Research Unit, which will support the ABLE team as well as evaluate current Diversion Center programs. The Evaluation Research Unit will use state-wide available data to identify high utilizers of the mental health and criminal justice system, conduct research to identify risk markers and/or intervention targets and times, use data to track recidivism so that individual and system level interventions can be evaluated, and improve data access and sharing across systems, which will increase the ability to identify needs and linkages to services. The Program Research Specialist may perform the following tasks:
• Plan, develop and implement studies that analyze mental health and criminal justice data to identify high utilizers of the mental health and criminal justice systems.
• Evaluate the effectiveness of programs and interventions aimed at reducing recidivism, re-hospitalization, and continued homelessness and improving outcomes for individuals cycling through criminal justice, mental health, and social service systems.
• Independently perform inferential statistical analyses to identity risk markers and intervention targets for individuals with mental health needs who are involved in the criminal justice system.
• Create data visualization tools, dashboards, and reports to communicate key findings and insights to stakeholders.
• Work with other state and local agencies to determine data needs, merge large data sets, and analyze data.
• Plan program evaluation studies to determine the impact and effectiveness of diversion programs.
Minimum Qualifications:
To be eligible for appointment, candidates must have a bachelor's degree that includes or is supplemented by nine semester credit hours in statistics, biostatistics, economics, econometrics, mathematics, research methods, data analysis, data science, or data modeling AND three years of professional research experience in the collection and evaluation of quantitative data directed toward review and analysis of program operations.
A J.D. or master's degree may substitute for one year of the experience; a doctoral degree may substitute for two years of the experience.
Preferred candidates will have a strong background and research experience in criminal justice, forensic mental health, and/or diversion programs.