The remainder of the special issue was carefully crafted with respect to Peek’s depiction of a “three world view” (Patterson

et al. 2002; Peek 2008). Peek, an innovator in behavioral health integration, has challenged those committed to healthcare to think about it from the viewpoints of clinical, operational, and financial perspectives. Healthcare’s clinical world is relevant to the models and approaches that providers use to deliver care to patients and families. The operational world is related to the workflow, procedural, and structural (re)design elements of healthcare. The financial world is about how healthcare systems sustain themselves economically, and on what we need to change across clinic-, state-, and federal- levels to do so. We have designed this issue to provide information and innovations at each buy Defactinib Selleckchem MDV3100 of these levels. Articles at the clinical levels include Lewis et al.’s biospsychorelational overview of military and veteran couples, Forbat et al.’s qualitative investigation regarding clinical support of caregivers at patients’ end-of-life, Fitzgerald and Thomas’ report regarding working with couples struggling with medical conditions through attachment PP2 nmr perspectives and emotionally-focused couples therapy,

and Skorunka et al.’s family-based efforts with patients struggling with psychosomatic disorders. Articles at the operational levels include Fox et al.’s account regarding the opportunities and challenges for family therapists working in primary care and Marlowe et al.’s framework for making such integration work. Articles at the financial levels include Edwards et al.’s primer for Medical Family Therapists in healthcare policy and Crane and Christenson’s summary report of family therapy’s cost effectiveness. Articles tying Org 27569 all three of these worlds together include Tyndall et al.’s theoretical and empirical review of MedFT, Mendenhall et al.’s call to advance research in our field, and Tyndall et al.’s consideration of competencies core to our work. In 2010, the American Association

for Marriage and Family Therapy formulated a training track as part of its annual conference devoted to workforce development in MedFT. What is needed now is ongoing training across University training sites and at national conferences to help new and practicing clinicians and researchers grow and develop MedFT, so that they are more competitive in the marketplace. Empirical evidence is also needed that addresses the issues of health using a biopsychosocial-spiritual and systemic lens to generate outcomes that are transformative for patients and their families in-context. While Crane and Christenson (in this special issue) have provided us with some studies, we need more research to demonstrate the health benefits for the couple and family when the patient seeks treatment and members of their family/social systems are included as a part of it.