Millions of Americans suffer from a diagnosable mental health condition and deaths related to opioid misuse have been skyrocketing over the past 2 decades. The current behavioral health workforce tasked with addressing these issues is currently experiencing a shortage and projections foresee this shortage continuing in the coming years. However, the behavioral health workforce has…
The National Health Service Corps (NHSC) provides assistance to provider organizations in health professional shortage areas (HPSAs) in the form of loan repayments to providers who agree to work at eligible sites. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) invested $234 million in the NHSC, allowing them to provide support to over 14,000 providers. This report describes…
The United States’ rural communities are vulnerable populations with less access to behavioral health care than urban communities, but the same or worse needs. This report helps to understand the characteristics of the behavioral health workforce in rural areas, the services offered by rural provider organizations, and the barriers these organizations face to providing services.ArrayReport…
A Health Resources and Services Administration report stated that 77% of US counties experienced severe psychiatrist shortages in 2017, and yet 1 in 5 American adults experience a mental illness in a given year. There is a pressing need to map the supply of prescribing psychiatric workforce. This report maps the supply of psychiatrists, advanced…
Authorizing nurse practitioners and physician assistants to prescribe medication-assisted treatment (MAT) has the potential to expand Americans’ access to opioid use disorder (OUD) treatment, as nurse practitioners are more likely to serve rural and Medicaid-eligible populations than physicians, and physician assistants specialize in expanding physicians’ practice. This report helps to understand how the Comprehensive Addiction…
The field of behavioral health is experiencing a shortfall of licensed providers. Community health workers (CHWs) and peer recovery specialists (PRSs) function as critical components of the workforce that can mitigate access and treatment gaps. Increasing demand for behavioral health services, exacerbated by the ongoing opioid epidemic, has intensified the need for addiction counselors (ACs),…
After the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, behavioral health coverage has expanded to cover more US citizens. However, access to behavioral health services remains an issue, owing in part to maldistribution of the workforce. The psychiatric workforce, in particular, is in the middle of a…
Accurate enumeration of behavioral health workforce supply and characteristics is important for workforce planning. Although numerous data sources exist for the behavioral health workforce, all have substantial data limitations and comparability across data sources is low. A behavioral health workforce Minimum Data Set (MDS) was developed in 2016 to improve data quality. This qualitative report…
Because 60–80% of all primary care visits include a behavioral health component, providing integrated services in primary care is now considered a priority for health systems as they strive to meet patient needs and improve population health. Integrated care typically involves behavioral healthcare workers such as social workers and psychologists working on teams with primary care…
Subspecialists of psychiatrists that treat vulnerable populations are in short supply across the country. Discrepancies in supply between rural and urban areas are likely, but little is known about how these subspecialties are geographically distributed. This report examined county-level data of different subspecialties of psychiatrists to determine how the subspecialties were distributed and whether there…
