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Nov. 2009 Northern Tier Providers Conference
“Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS) Commissioner Karen
Carpenter-Palumbo, third from right, stands with, from left, Director of North Country Behavioral Healthcare
Network, Barry Brogan; CEO of Saranac Lake’s St. Joseph’s Addiction Treatment and Recovery Centers Bob Ross;
and Director of the Department of Governmental Relations for Albert Einstein College of Medicine’s Ira Marion
during this past week’s Northern Tier Providers Coalition’s 12th Annual Conference.”
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This past week, Office of Alcohol and Substance Abuse Services (OASAS) Commissioner Karen Carpenter-Palumbo addressed
representatives of the Northern Tier Providers’ Coalition, the organization for addiction specialists serving seven
upstate counties of New York, including Franklin and Essex Counties, at the group’s 12th annual conference held at
the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Lake Placid. 130 members attended this year’s conference, making the 2009 gathering the
most highly attended event ever for the Coalition.
OASAS regulates and funds the providers comprising the Northern Tier Coalition and is, in fact, the nation’s
largest and most diverse addiction prevention and treatment system. The Office supervises more than 1,300 local,
community-based chemical dependence treatment programs, such as St. Joseph’s, in Saranac Lake which collectively
serve about 110,000 persons state-wide on any given day in a wide range of comprehensive addiction services.
During her address, the Commissioner spoke passionately about, despite the challenges of constrained budgets,
the imperative to maintain the greatest availability of treatment to the estimated 46,000 men, women, and children
suffering from addiction in the Northern Tier’s service area.
To achieve this objective, the Commissioner cited three specific opportunities: improving access to services,
establishing an even more comprehensive treatment outcome tracking model, and encouraging individual providers
to become creative leaders in generating yet greater efficiencies without an increase in dollars expended.
One of the Commissioner’s personal goals is to not impose budget cuts across the board, and therefore reduce
services, but for providers to work more innovatively. “You all do great work,” she encouraged, “and we must all
think about creative approaches to expand available resources to maintain services. There’s nothing we can’t do
if we work together. Together, let’s go to the gold standard.”
St. Joseph’s, which operates its Inpatient facility in Saranac Lake, as well as Outpatient clinics in Saranac Lake,
Lake Placid, Ticonderoga, Malone, and Elizabethtown, received a Public Service Award from OASAS for increasing
communitiy knowledge of the field of chemical dependency.
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