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Vt. Puts Focus on Mental Health

Valley News - 4/1/2017

VtDigger

MontpelierThe Vermont Senate unanimously approved a comprehensive mental health bill on Thursday that calls for increased pay for mental health workers and a broader look at how to improve the system.

The Senate endorsed the bill, S.133, in a voice vote after senators raised concerns about the number of psychiatric patients waiting in emergency rooms to get proper care. The bill won final approval in the Senate on Friday and now moves to the House.

At the time the bill was being discussed on the floor, the state Department of Mental Health said it was aware of five adults and one adolescent waiting in emergency rooms for treatment, but that there might be more.

The University of Vermont Medical Center, which has the largest emergency room in the state, reported having five patients waiting, and it’s unclear if those are the same patients in the Department of Mental Health tally.

Sen. Claire Ayer, D-Addison, said the number of psychiatric patients being held in emergency rooms has gone up since flooding from Tropical Storm Irene closed the state hospital in Waterbury in 2011 and the state built a new facility in Berlin.

“It’s a very ‘slight’ rise, but what people are telling us is that they’re seeing an increased intensity” in the patients, Ayer said. “It seems that there’s more trauma coming in with the patients.”

She pointed to testimony from an expert who described some of the patients waiting for placement as “a homicidal 6-year-old, a 9-year-old too scary to leave at home with his parents, a young man who wanted to cannibalize his family, and several geriatric patients” who cannot get placed in a nursing home.

Ayer said that while so many psychiatric patients are waiting in emergency room beds and being guarded by sheriffs, the publicly funded designated mental health agencies have crisis beds that are empty because the agencies don’t have the money to hire nurses to staff them.

Ayer said low pay is the main reason nurses and other workers aren’t choosing to work at the designated mental health agencies. She said there may also be licensing requirements stopping workers from coming to Vermont, and a national shortage of people going into mental health fields.

S.133 would require the Agency of Human Services to provide the Legislature with an action plan by Sept. 1 on about a half-dozen issues that are contributing to inadequate mental health treatment.

Those issues include how adults and children move through the mental health system; how much it would cost for the state to implement a better system for patients to navigate through the system; and how to make sure patients who arrive at hospitals are treated the same, “regardless of whether (they have) a psychiatric or a physical condition.”

The Senate temporarily stripped a provision in S.133 that would have allocated $30.2 million to increase pay for workers. They also amended the previous version of the bill, which would have increased pay at designated mental health agencies to $15 an hour for front-line workers and 85 percent of market rate for salaried workers.

Sen. Jane Kitchel, D-Caledonia, the chair of the Appropriations Committee, said the committee’s practice at this point in the budget process is to take money requests out of policy bills until members can look at all the requested spending increases throughout the state budget.

The amendment would create a three-year process for increasing pay for mental health workers. Front-line workers would get $14 an hour starting July 1, and $15 an hour starting July 1, 2018.

The amendment also calls for giving salaried workers 85 percent of market rate starting July 1 and increasing their pay again for the following two fiscal years.