Behavioral health is undergoing a broad awakening, with both leaders and the public increasingly seeing it as vital. The industry may fail to capture the full momentum of those tailwinds, however, if certain obstacles are not addressed.
Evans Rochaste, NP, founder and CEO of culturally competent behavioral health provider ReKlame Health, spoke with Becker's about how to tackle some of behavioral health's labor issues.
Editor's note: This response was lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How do we get a more equitable provider pool in psychiatry?
Evans Rochaste: We have to think about some of the structural challenges at large. Forty-four percent of African Americans say they would prefer a provider who looks like them, and when you have providers that look like the community they're serving, engagement goes up. Trust goes up.
Personally, I had tremendous trouble finding a provider that could relate to me, finding a provider that identifies as a person of color, and at the time, even finding a provider who took any type of insurance. It's tough because you're navigating a very complex system. So in the midst of having these mental health symptoms, it made things even more challenging for me as a patient.
Confidence between the provider and the patient during that shared decision making process, when we're talking about mental health, that can be the difference between life and death. But to do nursing school or nurse practitioner school or become a physician, you oftentimes need some resources to be able to do that.
It was extremely difficult for me to even go to nursing school — my mom had to pull out money from her retirement fund.
So one way we can address some of the equitability challenges in mental health is to support medical students by paying them to go to school. Help alleviate that burden so they can then, especially if it's a provider of color, go into the inner city [to practice].