2012 Outstanding Clinicians Awards

For the fourth time, Addiction Professional is pleased to honor exemplary clinical professionals as a way of giving credit to dedicated clinical service delivered throughout the field. Our annual Outstanding Clinicians Awards honorees are selected based on nominations submitted by our print and online readers, in the categories of counselor, clinical supervisor/manager, and physician.
The three award winners profiled this year, Pat Hurt, Rawland Glass and Lauren Lehmann, MD, have embraced the challenge of working with some of the field’s highest-need patient populations: adolescents, individuals with process addictions, and military veterans. We will formally honor our winners October 1, 2012  at the National Conference on Addiction Disorders (NCAD) in Orlando, Fla.

Pat Hurt

Position: Counselor/therapist
Nominating Organization: The Grace Homes, Visalia, Calif.
Age: 63
Quote: “I’m a cognitive-behavioral therapist, so I’m looking at restructuring clients’ very somber thinking about themselves and how they see themselves in the world.”
Comment from a colleague: “Ms. Hurt’s passion to help change lives one at a time by providing skilled counseling is her strength,” stated Grace Homes program administrator Glenda Kuns. “She is a wonderful mentor and role model to other women.”

In her numerous contract roles as an addiction counselor and licensed clinical social worker, Pat Hurt has earned a reputation as a bridge builder and troubleshooter. That came to life in a recent interview with Addiction Professional, when she had to cut the appointment short because two of the young women she counsels appeared to be headed for an altercation off-site. She was the agency’s go-to source for heading off a crisis.

Hurt has worked with both adults and adolescents in a variety of therapeutic and criminal justice settings in California, but she arguably earns the greatest measure of credibility from her young charges, given that she once was a pregnant and out-of-control teen trying to find her way.

“When you meet me, it’s real apparent,” says Hurt, who was nominated for an Outstanding Clinicians Award by colleagues at The Grace Homes faith-based residential programs for adolescents, where she serves as a contract therapist. “Kids are very good at sizing someone up. I’m very clear in my communication and never disrespectful.”

Hurt’s firsthand knowledge of who the players were in the criminal justice arena paid off for her in the late 1960s and early ’70s as she pursued a career in Tulare County, Calif., after earning a degree in criminology. Her roles over the years ranged from counseling in correctional settings to conducting outpatient groups for parolees.

She believes she was welcomed into justice settings, even at times when recovery professionals and law enforcement officials still were seen as coming from opposite “camps,” because she had clinical skills, a recovery history, and an ability to regulate her own thoughts and emotions when working with individuals who struggle in those areas.

“When we’re young, we make very poor choices out of trying to resolve our needs, without much information,” Hurt says. “There hasn’t been a sense that we’ve been loved or nurtured. It isn’t always overt neglect—it could be that both parents were working and their primary focus was on [financially] supporting the family.”

Her cognitive-behavioral approach to treatment seeks to assist young people in restructuring their thinking. She also looks for visual, concrete representations to share, as she says the young women she presently works with often have had their abstract thinking capabilities significantly compromised. In one of her exercises, “They write and draw things that represent recovery on bricks, and this becomes the foundation for their recovery goals,” she says.

Hurt maintains ongoing relationships with many of her young clients. “They send me photos of their children or of themselves in college,” she says. “It becomes important for them to show that they are working hard. I always tell them that I’m not looking for perfection, just looking for progress.”

Rawland Glass

Position: Clinical director
Organization: The Bridge to Recovery, Bowling Green, Ky.
Age: 55
Quote: “You’re really in a dual relationship with counselors. You’re supervising them as an employee, but on the other hand they are my clients. I need to know what’s triggering them in groups, and how they are working things out.”
Comment from a colleague: The colleague who nominated Glass for the award wrote, “His experience with managing people and complex projects allows him to guide a team of therapists in working with individuals with varied personalities who are struggling with codependency, trauma and numerous process addictions.”

The Bridge to Recovery engages in complex clinical work in order to probe underlying issues behind patients’ substance and process addictions. But amid this intensive work, Rawland Glass says his duties in supervising the direct-care staff at the organization’s Kentucky location also must address the mundane details: Are clinicians dressing properly for work? Are groups starting on time?

“This is crucial to clients receiving the care they need and deserve,” Glass says.
Glass has worked full-time at The Bridge to Recovery for more than two years, after having served as a contract therapist. He oversees a total of about a dozen counselors, house managers and other client service workers at any time, and says he prefers to maintain a direct but respectful style in which both he and the clinical staff have license to address problems head-on.

“My approach is to be very candid,” he says. “I tell the staff that they have the right to whine, complain, gripe, even about me and how I approach things.”
Glass doesn’t act so agreeable when he sees colleagues assume that an identified problem has no reasonable solution. He believes the time invested in involving much of the staff in devising solutions pays off in the end, though sometimes he finds he has to raise the stakes in order to improve engagement.

This occurred at The Bridge when clients were brazenly ignoring the facility’s ban on smoking. Some clinicians believed it would be unproductive to confront violators of the policy, while some might have preferred simply to dismiss the rule breakers from the program and eradicate the problem that way. Glass pressed on, convincing the staff to begin addressing the topic of smoking on a consistent basis in group, and setting the boundaries needed to resolve the situation.

“It becomes a tool to help people look at their own clinical issues,” Glass says of the emphasis on enforcing a smoke-free campus.

Among his duties, Glass remains committed to staying involved with client care, both by working directly with groups and training clinicians in trauma resolution work. “When I’m not involved with clients, I’m seen as more authoritarian and dogmatic,” he says. “In the other instance, they see me as much more human and connected.”

Lauren Lehmann, MD

Position: Medical director
Organization: Salem (Virginia) VA Medical Center Substance Abuse Residential Rehabilitation Treatment Program
Age:55
Quote: “We have tried to eliminate all the access barriers we can identify, to allow as many veterans as possible into the various elements of our program.”
Comment from a colleague: “She still personally sees each veteran that comes into the 26-bed unit and tailors a plan of action for them,” wrote the VA colleague who nominated Lehmann. “Veterans respect her and appreciate her for helping them during very challenging times in their lives.”

Descriptors such as “unflappability” and “clear vision” mark the award nomination language for Lauren Lehmann, MD. But perhaps in a fashion befitting the “we” mindset of the veteran population she serves at the Salem VA Medical Center’s substance use treatment program, Lehmann talks all about team.

“We have a relatively large multidisciplinary treatment team, including social workers, peers and vocational counselors,” says Lehmann, who arrived at the Virginia facility from the Houston VA in 1993. “Everyone does his job, and it works. We’ve been fortunate to have little staff turnover.”

Colleagues insist they have been fortunate to have Lehmann’s leadership at a time when the presenting problems of returning veterans have become more challenging and multi-layered and when the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs is prioritizing the elimination of any barriers to service access in VA operations.

“Scheduling admissions once a week was a barrier,” Lehmann says in offering an example identified in her facility. By moving to admissions three times a week and expanding the number of new admissions overall, the Salem facility is now able to see veterans transition directly from acute psychiatric care to the 26-bed residential substance use treatment unit without undue delays.

Lehmann says that as medical director her work is about 60% administrative, but she remarks that her management style involves staying out of the way and providing guidance only when needed. The colleague who nominated her for the award interprets it as maintaining a calm demeanor and believing in the staff. “Her leadership is quiet and thoughtful—you want to be a part of her work,” the nominator wrote.

Lehmann meets with each residential patient in a treatment team setting at least twice during a typical 21-day stay. About 40% of the patient base is addressing a co-occurring issue in addition to substance abuse; the Salem facility’s proximity to the Center for Traumatic Stress and other mental health-related resources offers numerous opportunities for integrated care.

She says the residential program incorporates buprenorphine treatment for some veterans, although patients’ interest in other medication-assisted treatments is not as high as she’d like to see it. Most importantly, she and her staff want to be at the ready with services and support at the very moment the “lights click on” for the patient.

As stated in the nomination document, Lehmann “believes in more than second chances for veterans—[she] has cultivated the belief that we take everyone that comes to us and we will work with each individual within their life supports.”