More than a dozen behavioral health workforce centers and other mental health organizations are forming a new group to address behavioral workforce challenges.
The Behavioral Health Workforce Center Alliance is led by the Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska. The center, launched in 2009, was the first state-funded behavioral health workforce center.
The center, or BHECN, is part of Omaha-based University of Nebraska Medical Center. BHECN has helped several other states launch their own workforce centers. Marley Doyle, MD, director of the Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska, told Becker’s the new alliance is designed to facilitate learning among states on a more formal level, and to develop a coalition to affect change on a national level.
Nineteen organizations are participating in the alliance.
Dr. Doyle explained why she hopes every state creates a behavioral health workforce center, and how workforce challenges in behavioral health are evolving.
Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What will organizations get out of participating in this alliance?
Dr. Marley Doyle: Over the years, we’ve had one-off experiences with states that were trying to create a similar state-funded behavioral health workforce center. We worked with Illinois, we worked with Nevada, and they have since set up behavioral health workforce centers in their state. It got to a point where we finally felt we had enough traction to be able to create an alliance. That was the impetus for starting this — we started seeing more and more behavioral health workforce centers cropping up across the United States.
The idea is that the alliance will be a national network of workforce development centers that will join together to address workforce challenges. Workforce challenges aren’t unique to any one state or another. Each state experiences different types of challenges, so we wanted to bring together states so we could share experiences and collectively create best practices to address behavioral health workforce challenges on a national level. Interestingly, since we started the alliance, we’ve had more states reach out that are interested in joining, because they are finding this model is helpful.
The other thing that makes it successful and unique is that all of the members come from a variety of behavioral health backgrounds and professions. That allows the Alliance to take a really comprehensive approach to the behavioral health workforce. I think that is a strength, because we’re not just focusing on one profession.
Q: Do you anticipate the alliance growing in the coming years?
MD: Our hope is that there will be a behavioral health workforce model in each state. We think that model works really well, and we are passionate about helping states get these set up. Ideally, this will grow and be a strong, robust network where we can share and learn from each other, and have traction to make change on a national level. But the idea at first is to bring this experience so people can feel this is reachable in their state, if they’re interested in starting something.
Q: BHECN has been doing this work for more than a decade. How have you seen behavioral workforce challenges evolving?
MD: When BHECN started in 2009, the focus was on getting more people into behavioral health careers. There was a lot of focus on talking to students, doing career panels and job fairs. That was successful, because there’s been a shift culturally where behavioral health is being talked about more than ever. What we’re seeing now is students are very, very interested [in behavioral health]. There’s not as much stigma. The problem that we’re seeing now is a bottleneck. There’s not enough behavioral health spots in graduate training programs, so we’re not able to train all of the students that are interested.
We’ve been focusing on working with schools on how do we get students and more faculty to be able to train more people? The other end of the spectrum is, how do we keep these professionals in the behavioral health workforce? We saw a dip during the pandemic, like many professions, in which people just weren’t able to stay in. They were burned out and retiring early, for example.
We’ve also had to focus now more on retention. Our workforce generally is aging. In Nebraska, for example, 50% of psychiatrists are over the age of 50, and we’re not able to replenish that workforce as quickly as they are retiring. We’ve evolved to focusing more on the second half of the training spectrum, whereas when we started doing this work, the focus was on the early career. I think that’s a change that has been reflected nationwide. When we talk to these other states, we hear similar things.
