Sharing – America Needs a National Institute of Healthcare Education
We’ve talked about the shortage of mental health professionals before. In fact, we’ve even talked about the fact that we aren’t going to suddenly create a whole bunch of newly trained professionals.
“All told, the American health care system has a massive shortage of those who can provide frontline mental health care.
Two things will go a long way to resolving the mental health care crisis and delivering already proven treatments to all U.S. citizens.
Train the primary care clinicians who provide nearly all care.
Train more psychiatrists, psychologists, psychiatric nurse practitioners, and psychiatric physician assistants.”
Dr. Smith calls for the creation of a new institute to educate not only new mental health professionals but also to make sure that primary care practitioners are trained to offer some mental health support to patients since right now that seems to be where most people who are in need of mental health care wind up.
I haven’t fully considered all of the possibilities with this particular idea, but I will agree that it’s going to take something at this kind of national level to start to address the need.
The need is large, and it’s not going to go away. It calls for something large. Maybe this?
