Home > In the News > Nurturing Comprehensive Care For Families

In the News

As published in UConn Health Center Magazine, Summer 2007.

Nurturing Comprehensive Care For Families

By Karen Singer

Jeri Hepworth at the Asylum Hill Family Practice Center in Hartford.

More and more, research shows improved health outcomes when mental health services are provided at the same location as primary and specialty health care,” says Jeri Hepworth, Ph.D., family therapist, professor and vice chair of the medical school’s Department of Family Medicine.

She has spent most of her career developing this collaborative approach to integrating mental health services within primary care settings.

She works with patients and other family medicine faculty at the Asylum Hill Family Practice Center in Hartford, the clinical site of the Family Practice Residency Program that is sponsored by UConn and Saint Francis Hospital and Medical Center.

As a UConn graduate student, Hepworth’s doctoral research on the effects of parental loss on the formation of intimate relations led to her interest in family medicine – and to a job in that department in 1981. She was behavior science director for many years, became associate residency director in the mid-1990s and was appointed department vice chair about five years ago. She has coauthored three books, including Medical Family Therapy and The Shared Experience of Illness, in which therapists describe how personal experience with illness affects their work with clients.

Such self-awareness is something Hepworth stresses in her training. “I help physicians realize the work they’re doing is incredibly emotionally taxing and how this work can take a toll on their personal health or make them cut themselves off from patients when they don’t mean to,” she says.

Hepworth notes that as patients have longer lives with more chronic illness, families have greater caregiver responsibilities and need to be involved with the health care team. In addition to the physical, social and emotional stresses of illness, physicians can be sensitive to a spiritual component to their work. “Illness, and certainly chronic or end-stage illness, is an existential crisis,” she says. “Part of a physician’s strategy should be to determine who would be helpful to talk with patients and families. This can include traditional mental health clinicians or spiritual leaders. We can all encourage these conversations with patients, as well as facilitate ways for families to communicate with all of the clinicians involved with their care.”

According to Hepworth, more clinicians are having those important collaborative conversations, despite privacy concerns and restrictions on patient information. “All that needs to happen is for a patient to give permission,” Hepworth says, adding in her experience they’re always willing to do so.

This year, as a fellow in the Hedwig van Amerigen executive leadership program for women in academic medicine, Hepworth is thinking about administrative strategies to facilitate collaborative clinical and research programs to enhance models of comprehensive care for patients and families.