Introducing our new Director of Mental Heath Training & Education

Sunny Hills Services has appointed agency veteran Brad Freed to assume the new position of Director of Mental Health Training & Education. Brad brings a tremendous depth of knowledge and experience to his new position having served in the field of child and adolescent treatment services for more than 20 years.

As Sunny Hills has transitioned from being principally a provider of residential services to severely emotionally disturbed children and adolescents to one that offers a full array of community-based mental health services, the need to develop a common clinical training platform for staff has been brought to the fore. Under Brad’s leadership, Sunny Hills will develop the means by which to evaluate our work, encourage a level of rigor in our practice, and deepen our culture around ongoing learning and development.

A key facet of Brad’s work in the coming year will be to lead the implementation of evidence-based practices across all of sites, to ensure our clinical practices are not only current, but also effective and consistently applied across the multiple settings where our services are delivered. Brad will also develop and maintain organizational training standards, assuring the provision of training to meet professional, regulatory, accreditation and contractual requirements.

The investment in our clinical infrastructure and practice is an outgrowth of the transition we have made programmatically over the last several years. In this era of state cutbacks to a wide range of social services, Sunny Hills’ fiscal budget has emerged relatively unscathed by these draconian cuts. Approximately 50% of the agency’s revenues are derived from county EPDST (mental health) contracts, a more sustainable source of revenue for the agency. This only reinforces our decision made several years ago to exit residential care and position the agency so that we could deliver community-based mental health services on a much broader scale than before.

Please join me in congratulating Brad on his new position!