Expanding NM’s behavioral health workforce

BY STATE SEN. JERRY ORTIZ Y PINO DEMOCRAT, ALBUQUERQUE

I serve on the interim Legislative Health and Human Services Committee. During this past summer and fall, our committee held hearings around the state on what we should be working on in the 2023 session. Everywhere we went, the No. 1 issue was the same: there are not enough behavioral health providers to meet the need.

Adding money to expand services is going to be successful only if there are actually social workers, counselors, psychologists and psychiatric nurses available to staff those programs. Right now in our state, there aren’t enough. Our challenge is how to get more behavioral health providers — and quickly.

Here is a seven-point effort we will be advancing to do this. It won’t change the picture overnight completely, but it will start filling the pipeline and we should begin seeing an increased supply of trained professionals within a year or two — if we implement all seven points of this plan.

1. Extend the new opportunity scholarship program for undergraduates to masters’ level programs at our state universities for behavioral health fields: social work, counseling, psychology and psychiatric nursing. The free tuition in those fields should come with an agreement that graduates who accept those scholarships will work in this state for a similar number of years.

2. Increase the number of community colleges and branch colleges that offer certificate and associate-level programs in human services and social work, including peer counseling and community health worker certificate programs. These programs not only feed into the professional programs, but also many of their students provide the crucial and highly effective workforce for community programs immediately.

3. Provide funding for community behavioral health providers to employ graduates of professional programs and to start serving clients, under supervision, prior to their licensure. We lose many graduates of our professional programs because they have to spend as many as 3,000 hours of supervised work licensure before the agency can collect fees from insurance or Medicaid for their work. Helping agencies pay for these workers until insurance kicks in will make more of them want to employ new graduates, keeping them in the field they have studied.

4. Provide agencies with funding to pay for the part-time work graduate students have to put in before they can graduate. These internships are an important way for students to discover agencies they might want to work for after graduation, which is likely to keep them in the state rather than seeking work elsewhere.

5. Pay for the time of supervisory staff at behavioral health agencies to free them up to mentor and serve as preceptors for new employees. Now, agencies are faced with sacrificing the reimbursements they would be receiving from insurers for services to clients that those experienced staff could be earning instead of the time they spend currently on unreimbursed supervision and mentoring work.

6. To promote the development of new behavioral health services in communities that now don’t have enough, a fund should be created, administered by the Behavioral Health Division, to provide grants to individual providers or agencies that establish their practices in underserved areas. These grants would cover the costs of operation until reimbursements begin flowing. It often takes five or six months at the earliest for new practices to begin generating revenue, a serious obstacle.

7. An additional School of Social Work should be created in Albuquerque at UNM. This would tap our largest population center, and the opportunities provided for training at and supporting the work of the numerous public and private agencies in the metro area. The synergy created would be a powerful impetus for expanded and improved behavioral health services.

Our efforts to get all seven initiatives passed in this session can, if successful, make today’s shortage of behavioral health professionals go away. Then, the Legislature’s focus can be shifted to strengthening a robust and functional system, and away from the process of rebuilding a damaged system that has preoccupied us for the past 10 years.