Paolo del Vecchio, Director, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

My name is Paolo del Vecchio and I work for the federal government, the US Department of Health and Human Services, where I work at a Mental Health and Addictions agency, addressing concerns of mental illness and substance use across the country. We work on everything from looking at ways we can lower the amount of homelessness across the United States, the number of people living with mental health and addictions in our streets and in our shelters, to looking at issues of criminal justice in mental health involvement. We know far too many people in our jails and prisons with mental illness and with addictions as well. We do a major focus looking at ways that we can improve mental health care delivery, having better trained mental health and addiction staff around the country providing needed care and support for people, 'cause frankly far too few people get the care that they need today. Job that I have right now is administrative, and so I support the operations angle for the federal agency. So I assist with things ranging from information technology, looking at ways technology can improve our work, to looking at issues of travel and purchasing and continuity of operations. So this is planning and preparation in case there's a disaster, either man made or natural, how are we gonna continue operations to ensure that we're continuing to help people with mental illness and addictions across the country? So that involves helping to ensure that we have the technology, we have the services, we have the personnel in place, so that if we have to move out of our building, to our other facilities, can we tell the work to make sure that we continue the good work that the American public has trusted us with? So the kind of things I'm working on could range from looking at how do we ensure the health and safety of the staff that work in our agency to looking at issues of investigating fraud and abuse issues, to looking at how we can improve the kind of computer technologies that we use in our agency to make sure that we pursue our mission.