NYAPRS Note: Yesterday’s Assembly hearing on the mental health workforce crisis featured some powerful and illuminating comments by MHANYS’ Glenn Liebman, the NYS Council’s Lauri Cole, Horizon Health’s Ann Constantino, NAMI’s Matt Shapiro and NYAPRS’ Harvey Rosenthal, as well as those from our fellow advocates ACL’s Doug Cooper and Sebrina Barrett, NYS Coalition for Children’s Behavioral Health Andrea Smyth, Families Together’s Paige Pierce, and the Coalition for Behavioral Health’s. Nadia Chait.
All of us gave specific examples of the magnitude the crisis has affected the people who rely on community based mental health services and the providers who seek to deliver them in what many of us consider as an unprecedented state of emergency that has been jeopardizing essential care and support for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in need, including long waiting list to see people who are struggling with suicidal thoughts.
We are asking for a 5.4% COLA and an infusion of $500 million to repair the safety net after over a decade of neglect and broken promises. We are looking to Governor Hochul’s budget and Legislative action to get these done, as a time when New York has more surplus dollars to do so in memory. T
Look for a series of concerted state and local actions in the coming weeks.
NY’s Mental Health Workforce ‘On Life Support,’ Asks State to Release Funds
By Dan Clark WBFO-FM 88.7 November 10, 2021
The mental health care workforce in New York has waited for years to receive more funding from the state, and organizations that represent those workers say the coming state budget should be the avenue to make good on that promise.
Those organizations are calling on the Hochul administration to propose a 5.4% cost of living adjustment in funding for that workforce, plus an additional $500 million, in next year’s budget.
At a public hearing in Albany Tuesday, representatives from those groups said the amount of funding currently set aside by the state for the mental health care workforce isn’t enough to sustain the industry, which has faced higher demand during the pandemic.
Glenn Liebman, CEO of the Mental Health Association, said that, with that funding, lives could be saved through a more robust response from the state.
“We’ve lost too many lives of people with mental health and addiction disorders over the last several decades,” Liebman said. “This funding will help ensure that tomorrow, and in the future, the lives of these individuals will be met with respect, support, and recovery.’
But what Liebman and other advocates asked for on Tuesday wasn’t out of the blue.
When former Gov. George Pataki and the state Legislature approved the state budget in 2006, they built in a statutory requirement that was supposed to provide bumps in state funding each year for the human services workforce based on inflation.
Since then, the state has largely chosen to defer that law. In the 15 years since it was enacted, a cost of living adjustment, or COLA, has only been honored three times.
Because that funding has failed to come through for so many years, the mental health care workforce has been plagued by low wages, which has led to turnover and a constant influx of workers with less experience in the field.
That’s affected care, according to Harvey Rosenthal, the CEO of the New York Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services.
“We’re at a breaking point,” Rosenthal said. “We’re on life support, and we need to be resuscitated.”
The 5.4% cost of living adjustment sought by the organizations would be a culmination of the rate hikes deferred over the last decade, while the $500 million represents the funding those groups would have received had those increases happened as scheduled.
Assemblymember Aileen Gunther, a Democrat who chairs the mental health committee, said she would support more resources for mental health care in New York, saying the demand should match the state’s commitment to those services.
“I think we failed our mental health community in the last few years, in many ways, I really do,” Gunther said. “We have so much more work to do.”
The Hochul administration, last month, did announce $21 million in federal funding to bolster the state’s mental health care workforce, and another $4 million for peer services.
When asked Tuesday by Gunther if the administration would support a 5.4% cost of living adjustment for the state’s mental health care workforce, a representative for the state Office of Mental Health didn’t offer a position, and said it would be worked out in next year’s state budget.
“We look forward to having those discussions and working with our partners in the Legislature to, as we have in the past, be part of the discussions and negotiations in next year’s state budget on this COLA,” said Moira Tashjian, the agency’s executive deputy commissioner.
New York’s fiscal position is better than anticipated leading into next year, with $4 billion more in revenue than the state anticipated when the budget was approved last April.
Hochul will present her first state budget proposal in January, kicking off three months of negotiations with the Legislature before the spending plan is due at the end of March.
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Mental Health Services Struggling
BY JOE MAHONEY CNHI News Service November 10, 2021
ALBANY — Recruiting staff to provide mental health services has been a struggle for years. But that challenge has grown far more daunting during the pandemic.
That was among the messages delivered Tuesday by mental health administrators and care association leaders as they urged state lawmakers to back their push for greater state support to help stop the attrition that has accelerated over the past two years.
INCIDENT A DAY
“The burden on the front-line clinical staff is unrelenting,” said Anne Constantino, the president of Horizon Health Services, a nonprofit agency that has programs throughout Western New York, with several sites in Niagara Count. Horizon serves more than 14,000 people annually, with about 750 staffers and 41 current vacancies.
She said the programs recently averaged one critical incident per day: a fatal overdose, a suicide, an attempted suicide or an overdose that was reversed through intervention.
Because of Horizon’s inability to match the pay some other employers offer, Constantino said recruitment is a constant struggle, even though her company has received a New York State “Best Companies to Work” designation for 13 consecutive years.
“It is virtually impossible to do this work and make ends meet,” Constantino said, lamenting that government reimbursements are insufficient to keep the operation sustainable.
TURNOVER RATE Up
When a therapist moves on to another job, it is not merely inconvenient for Horizon, she pointed out; it can be devastating for the patient who had grown to rely on the assistance offered by that counselor.
The current staff turnover rate is 28%, up from 22% last year, she said.
Across New York, mental health service providers are dealing with three crises at once, said Harvey Rosenthal, director of the New York State Association of Psychiatric Rehabilitation Services.
Those crises are the impacts of COVID-19; the surge in demand for services responding to trauma, anxiety, depression, youth suicide and overdoses; and the state’s “inability” to address the demand after years of inadequate funding, Rosenthal said.
The state, he said, has “reneged” on previous commitments to provide annual cost-of-living adjustments to mental health workers.
“As a result, we have seen a steady stream of workers leaving or not even applying for community-based behavioral health positions,” Rosenthal said.
Meanwhile, the state psychiatric treatment programs have been wrestling with their own workforce challenges. Randi DiAntonio, vice president of the Public Employees Federation, said the state Office of Mental Health has been “bleeding nurses” because of stress from working during the pandemic and mandatory overtime, coupled with opportunities to increase their pay by taking more lucrative job offers.
“We’re losing services as fast as possible when we have waiting lists of families in crisis,” DiAntonio said. “We have people sitting on gurneys in emergency rooms, calling 911, because they don’t know where else to go.”
SALARY REVIEW URGED
The state has attempted to patch some of the labor shortages by retaining contract nurses, outside the civil service system, she said, adding: “But, frankly, they can’t keep them, either.”
DiAntonio urged lawmakers to supporting a review of salary grades for mental health professionals employed by the state, along with performance incentives.
“We have people who are dedicating their lives to taking care of those with mental illness, and they have been treated pretty badly by their employer,” she said.
The state government announced last month it is channeling $21 million in federal stimulus funding to increase access to mental health care and support the behavioral health workforce. But DiAntonio noted that money will go to providers outside the state’s own psychiatric programs.
STATE BUDGET HOPES
The advocates for the service providers are urging lawmakers to back a $500 million state funding commitment in the next state budget for the wide array of programs providing mental health services. They also said a 5.4% cost-of-living adjustment is crucial to address the staffing and retention challenges.
“I should tell you that staff who are seeing a lot of death and a lot of misery are traumatized,” said Lauri Cole, director of the New York State Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. “There is collective trauma across our workforce, and that as well as the lack of adequate salaries drive people out the door — and they are leaving in droves.”
After working in the mental health field for more than 40 years, Rosenthal said he has never observed the system under such stress as it is now.
“We’re on life support — and we need to be resuscitated,” Rosenthal said.
NY’s mental health workforce ‘on life support,’ asks state to release funds (wbfo.org)