207 The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 3 care providers, as well as increased reimbursements for the services they deliver. Furthermore, the federal government has recently pledged to double the funding support for IC to be more accessible in hospitals, substance abuse treatment facilities, family care practices, school systems, and other health care settings (The White House, 2022). This may be the result of IC showing efficacy in reducing mental health symptoms (Lenz et al., 2018), saving health care expenditures (Basu et al., 2017), and promoting overall life satisfaction (Gerrity, 2016). Compared to traditional (i.e., siloed) care, IC involves simultaneous treatment from physical and mental health providers, thus providing additional access to mental health screenings and services. For example, McCall et al. (2022) concluded that a mental health counselor in an IC setting may support treatment engagement and reduce health care costs for an individual with a substance use disorder when utilizing the screening, brief intervention, and referral to treatment (SBIRT) model. However, the IC paradigm is not a novel concept; Aitken and Curtis (2004) introduced IC to counseling journals by providing emerging evidence of IC support and advocating for health care settings to recognize counselors as an asset to IC teams and for counselors to be trained in IC. Brubaker and La Guardia (2020) noted that the Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (Section 5, Standard C.3.d; CACREP; 2015) required IC education in counselorin-training (CIT) development. Additionally, the 2024 CACREP Task Force has also included these standards for its proposed revisions (CACREP, 2022). HRSA has funded counselor education programs to train CITs during practicum and internship experiences, funding over 4,000 new school, addiction, or mental health counselors during 2014–2022 through the Behavioral Health Workforce and Education Training (BHWET) Program (HRSA, 2022). Although IC training, education, and practice is occurring within counselor education, IC literature remains scarce in counseling journals (Fields et al., 2023). The lack of representation presents an issue for appropriate training for CITs and future research directions, which leads to sustainability concerns. Specifically, Fields et al. (2023) reported that a lack of IC literature in counseling journals creates a weak foundation to advocate for counselors to be included in the IC movement. With the understanding that nearly half of U.S. adults with poor mental health receive their mental health care in a primary care setting (Petterson et al., 2014), counselors may increase their access to additional clients when they are invited to IC settings. Furthermore, it weakens counselors’ professional identity if counselors are not trained in a standardized approach. As such, this scoping review aims to amalgamate current IC literature within counseling journals and provide CITs, counselors, and counselor educators from diverse backgrounds with a resource to inform their education, practice, and scholarship. The guiding research question for this review is: What are the publication trends (i.e., publication years and journals), study characteristics and outcomes, implications, and recommendations for future research from IC literature within counseling journals? Method We conducted a scoping review to identify the publication trends, key characteristics of IC studies (i.e., type of article and study outcomes), and implications for future research of IC literature published in counseling journals (Munn et al., 2018). Our methodology followed the PRISMA-ScR (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses Extension for Scoping Reviews; Tricco et al., 2018) checklist to 1) establish eligibility, 2) identify sources of information, 3) conduct a screening process to select included articles, 4) identify and chart data items, 5) conduct a critical appraisal of included articles, and 6) synthesize results. We searched the following databases for eligible literature: (a) Alt HealthWatch, (b) APA PsycArticles, (c) APA PsycInfo, (d) Education Source, (e) EBSCOHost, (f) Health Source: Consumer Edition, (g) Health Source: Nursing/Academic Edition, (h) MEDLINE with Full Text, (i) Science Reference Center, (j) Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson), and (k) Social Work
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