This story by Clare Shanahan was first published in The Valley News on Dec. 25
LEBANON — Dartmouth Health and partners across the state are working to address New Hampshire’s shortage of behavioral health care workers, which is especially acute in rural areas, by increasing training opportunities for students.
Dartmouth Health is using $1.29 million of congressionally directed spending to help expand training programs for students seeking master’s degrees in behavioral health, social work and clinical psychiatry.
“We are acutely aware of the fact that people experience challenges when they are trying to access mental health care and this is a way that we feel like we can impact that by building the workforce of well-trained providers for the future,” Dr. Julie Frew, vice chair of psychiatry education at Dartmouth Health, said.
There are barriers for clinical training for students getting master’s degrees in behavioral health, Frew said. Unlike other types of medical education, behavioral health degree programs do not always connect students with the clinical placements required to earn their degrees. This training can also come with expenses and many providers do not have the capacity to train students.
“The onus is kind of on the student to go out and find their clinical rotation,” Frew said. Online programs, which are increasingly popular, are especially unlikely to have connections in the area if they are loccated outside the region. “These students end up having to essentially cold call or cold email people begging them to take them on.”
Connecting behavioral health students with providers for clinical rotations, and giving practicing providers the resources they need to successfully host students are the main goals Dartmouth Health wants to begin to address with the $1.29 million in federal funds, Frew said. This project was one of 101 projects totaling $103 million earmarked by Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., for fiscal year 2024.
Frew, her colleagues in the Dartmouth Health Department of Psychiatry, and an advisory board of statewide stakeholders want to build a website that includes a database of available clinical placements for students and other resources. They plan to include education materials for providers and offer training, workshops and funding opportunities to help defray the costs of in-office education.
The team hopes that by making it easier for people studying behavioral health to find training placements across New Hampshire, especially in social work and clinical psychiatry, they will stay and work in the state after their education.
There were 378 behavioral health workforce vacancies across New Hampshire’s 10 community behavioral health networks (made up of about 40 facilities statewide) in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023, according to the NH Community Behavioral Health Association.
Behavioral health care providers, who care for people with mental health and substance use disorders and also provide support with other life stressors and crises, are limited in rural areas statewide, with the lowest number in Sullivan County, according to a 2023 report by the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services.
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Kate Turcotte, who is the director of the Master of Social Work program at Colby-Sawyer College and a practicing social worker in New London, said she hopes the database will help to address gaps in underserved areas of social work in New Hampshire. Colby-Sawyer is one of the participants in the project’s advisory board.
When there are not enough behavioral health providers, patients are left with long wait times or go without care entirely, Turcotte said.
The shortage also creates a situation in which social workers can choose where geographically and in which specialization they would like to focus because there is a shortage of available providers; this creates greater gaps in certain areas such as social work focusing on children and on addiction, Turcotte said.
Turcotte attributes the workforce shortage to a lack of training opportunities.
As a practicing social worker in the region, especially in Sullivan County where she has worked in Claremont and Newport, “the needs are so great and we have a dearth of social workers here,” Turcotte said.
Colby-Sawyer began its Masters of Social Work program in 2023. It is one of only three social work programs in the state, with the other two at University of New Hampshire campuses. The program is primarily online with students able to watch recorded lectures and do assignments on their own time, but most of the students are from the area.
“We definitely draw from the region and that’s what we want to do,” Turcotte said.
At Colby-Sawyer, master’s of social work students are required to complete 900 hours of clinical training in two years. While program staff help students find clinical placements, they do not mandate where students work.
Many social workers want to take on students for training because “social workers are givers and there is this real culture of giving back, but it’s tough,” Turcotte said.
For providers to take on students, they need to meet several requirements in education, years of practical experience and sometimes specific training in supervising, Turcotte said. This takes time and money and often providers do not earn more money for supervising students, despite the additional work.
The barriers, coupled with the limited number of providers, create a “gap” in the opportunities for behavioral health training in New Hampshire.
The resources available through this project will hopefully support providers and make it easier for them to take on students, Turcotte said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Dartmouth Health seeks to expand access for behavioral health training programs.