Compounding the challenge of Utah's shortage of behavioral health care providers is a higher-than-average percentage of professionals who are
"repeat offenders" when it comes to medical malpractice payments and other adverse actions, according to a federal data bank that tracks such incidents.
Findings in the data bank could include revocation of a professional license, an industry association terminating a practitioner's membership, or the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revoking a practitioner's ability to be reimbursed for services, said Jeff Shumway, director of the Utah Department of Commerce's Office of Professional Licensure.
With respect to supervision, licensing officials propose revising requirements to "get rid of general experience hours requirements, which are less related to safety, and bump up the direct client hours where we can actually see if you're safe with clients. The point is reduce the overall hours, but crank up those that are more related to safety and make them higher quality," Shumway said.
Safety concerns further complicate access to behavioral health care, with the numbers of patients with unmet needs in Utah ranging from 210,000 to 515,000 individuals, according to the report to lawmakers. I think many of them would say they thought they were going to become a therapist by going into psychology as an undergrad, right? And yet, that's not what the training is. That seems to be a miss.Shumway said Utah also appears to have an "educational misalignment" as it relates to behavioral health."If you look at behavioral health, it's exactly inverted so you have a tremendous number of people with a master's and up and relatively few extenders," he said.
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