TOPEKA — Lawmakers said coaxing retired mental health care workers back into the field could be one way to mitigate the state’s mental health care worker shortage.
A special committee of the Kansas Legislature recently met with mental health care institutions, including colleges, state agencies and the Kansas Board of Nursing to delve into the subject. They said the state needed to find ways to increase and stabilize the number of mental health care workers.
Lucinda Whitney, clinical assistant professor at the University of Kansas School of Nursing, said she knew from her personal experience as a psychiatric mental health nurse that the field had many challenges, including long hours, dealing with verbal and physical aggression from patients, and high patient-to-staff ratios.
“These are major stressors that I think contribute to emotional exhaustion, some workplace dissatisfaction and potentially burnout,” she said. “But these conditions that most retired workers did work under can be mitigated. I think there is an opportunity to invite retired clinicians back to work.”
Whitney said some of these issues could be mitigated by offering technical and telehealth training to people who wanted to reenter the workforce.
Lawmakers have addressed other potential areas for improvement, such as making health care degrees more attainable for Kansans, fixing pay disparities in the field and creating incentive programs, such as scholarships and sign-on bonuses.
Rep. Will Carpenter, R-El Dorado, said he wanted to make sure incentive programs were tracked for efficacy.
“If we don’t do that, we’ve just wasted all the time that we’ve done this year on mental health beds,” Carpenter said. “And monitor what’s working and what isn’t, so we can evaluate the whole mental health system like that for employees.”
Over the past couple of months, legislators on the committee have been urged by local government officials, sheriffs and residents to fund more services. With little space available in psychiatric facilities across the state, community hospitals and jails have had to provide housing and care for mentally unstable patients without reimbursement.
In Kansas, people deemed a danger to themselves or others are processed by the district attorney’s office and sent to the county jail until a hospital bed is ready. Some inmates wait for months to be admitted to state psychiatric facilities.
To address the statewide mental health bed shortage, legislative leaders partnered with Gov. Laura Kelly to endorse the allocation of $15 million for planning a 50-bed minimum psychiatric hospital likely to be located in Sedgwick County.
