Talk about it

ST. CLOUD, Minn. – Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki recently announced the department would add approximately 1,600 mental health clinicians as well as nearly 300 support staff to its existing workforce. VA estimates that 7 additional clinicians and 2 support personnel will be hired to support mental health operations at the St. Cloud VA. Recruitment for those positions is underway.

“If in need of immediate assistance, Veterans should not wait to seek care,” said Dr. Sherrie Herendeen, Director of Mental Health at the St. Cloud VA. “We are strongly committed to meeting the mental health needs of our Veterans and have the processes in place to get them the care they need.”

Currently, 226 mental health clinicians and support staff work locally supporting central Minnesota Veterans at the St. Cloud VA Medical Center and Community Based Outpatient Clinics in Alexandria, Brainerd, and Montevideo.

The St. Cloud VA has seen a 29% increase in the number of Veterans receiving mental health services since 2006, and has increased mental health staff by 62% in the same period, Dr. Herendeen said.

To use VA health care, Veterans must apply for enrollment. To apply, Veterans should contact a County Veteran Service Officer, call the St. Cloud VA at 320-255-6340, or apply online at www.1010ez.med.va.gov. Immediate help is available anytime at www.VeteransCrisisLine.net or by calling the Crisis Line at 1-800-273-8255 (push 1) or texting 838255.

Interested mental health care providers can find additional information about VA careers online at www.va.careers.va.gov. Open positions, including those at the St. Cloud VA, can be viewed online at USA Jobs (www.usajobs.gov).

With each additional mental health care provider, the St. Cloud VA could potentially reach hundreds more Veterans battling mental illness. New providers will join a team that is already actively treating Veterans through individualized care, readjustment counseling, and immediate crisis services. Additional staff members also afford opportunities to look long-term and expand into cutting edge Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) research and to explore alternative therapies.

Secretary Shinseki noted that “as the tide of war recedes, we have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to anticipate the needs of returning Veterans.”

VA anticipates the majority of mental health clinicians and support staff will be hired locally within approximately six months and the most hard-to-fill positions filled by March 2013. To speed the hiring process, VA developed the Mental Health Hiring Initiative to improve marketing, recruitment, and hiring efforts for mental health professionals so that the new 1,600 mental health providers can be hired as quickly as possible. The initiative is an aggressive, multi-faceted, sustained national marketing and outreach campaign that includes targeted recruitment of mental health providers willing to take positions in rural and highly rural markets, as well as throughout the nation to serve all VA medical centers and community clinics.

“Mental health services must be closely aligned with Veterans’ needs and fully integrated with health care facility operations,” said VA Under Secretary for Health Dr. Robert Petzel. “Improving access to mental health services will help support the current and future Veterans who depend on VA for these vital services.”

Last year, VA provided quality, specialty mental health services to 1.3 million Veterans. Since 2009, VA has increased the mental health care budget by 39 percent. Since 2007, VA has seen a nationwide 35 percent increase in the number of Veterans receiving mental health services, and a 41 percent increase in mental health staff.

Tags:
news, updates, va, veterans, health

• St. Cloud VA to expand mental health staff
• VA to hire more mental health clinicians for region
• Military affairs beat: VA adds mental health staffers
• VA Announces Aggressive National Recruitment Effort to Hire Mental Health Professionals
• VA Montana to add 5 mental health clinicians, 2 support personnel

Talk about it

ST. CLOUD, Minn. – Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric K. Shinseki recently announced the department would add approximately 1,600 mental health clinicians as well as nearly 300 support staff to its existing workforce. VA estimates that 7 additional clinicians and 2 support personnel will be hired to support mental health operations at the St. Cloud VA. Recruitment for those positions is underway.

“If in need of immediate assistance, Veterans should not wait to seek care,” said Dr. Sherrie Herendeen, Director of Mental Health at the St. Cloud VA. “We are strongly committed to meeting the mental health needs of our Veterans and have the processes in place to get them the care they need.”

Currently, 226 mental health clinicians and support staff work locally supporting central Minnesota Veterans at the St. Cloud VA Medical Center and Community Based Outpatient Clinics in Alexandria, Brainerd, and Montevideo.

The St. Cloud VA has seen a 29% increase in the number of Veterans receiving mental health services since 2006, and has increased mental health staff by 62% in the same period, Dr. Herendeen said.

To use VA health care, Veterans must apply for enrollment. To apply, Veterans should contact a County Veteran Service Officer, call the St. Cloud VA at 320-255-6340, or apply online at www.1010ez.med.va.gov. Immediate help is available anytime at www.VeteransCrisisLine.net or by calling the Crisis Line at 1-800-273-8255 (push 1) or texting 838255.

Interested mental health care providers can find additional information about VA careers online at www.va.careers.va.gov. Open positions, including those at the St. Cloud VA, can be viewed online at USA Jobs (www.usajobs.gov).

With each additional mental health care provider, the St. Cloud VA could potentially reach hundreds more Veterans battling mental illness. New providers will join a team that is already actively treating Veterans through individualized care, readjustment counseling, and immediate crisis services. Additional staff members also afford opportunities to look long-term and expand into cutting edge Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) research and to explore alternative therapies.

Secretary Shinseki noted that “as the tide of war recedes, we have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to anticipate the needs of returning Veterans.”

VA anticipates the majority of mental health clinicians and support staff will be hired locally within approximately six months and the most hard-to-fill positions filled by March 2013. To speed the hiring process, VA developed the Mental Health Hiring Initiative to improve marketing, recruitment, and hiring efforts for mental health professionals so that the new 1,600 mental health providers can be hired as quickly as possible. The initiative is an aggressive, multi-faceted, sustained national marketing and outreach campaign that includes targeted recruitment of mental health providers willing to take positions in rural and highly rural markets, as well as throughout the nation to serve all VA medical centers and community clinics.

“Mental health services must be closely aligned with Veterans’ needs and fully integrated with health care facility operations,” said VA Under Secretary for Health Dr. Robert Petzel. “Improving access to mental health services will help support the current and future Veterans who depend on VA for these vital services.”

Last year, VA provided quality, specialty mental health services to 1.3 million Veterans. Since 2009, VA has increased the mental health care budget by 39 percent. Since 2007, VA has seen a nationwide 35 percent increase in the number of Veterans receiving mental health services, and a 41 percent increase in mental health staff.

Tags:
news, updates, va, veterans, health

• St. Cloud VA to expand mental health staff
• VA to hire more mental health clinicians for region
• Military affairs beat: VA adds mental health staffers
• VA Announces Aggressive National Recruitment Effort to Hire Mental Health Professionals
• VA Montana to add 5 mental health clinicians, 2 support personnel

CANTRIL, IA. — It’s hard to predict if the state’s attempt to reorganize its mental health care system will bring Danny Hughes the help he needs.

Once a month, he drives 45 minutes to a Veterans Affairs clinic in Ottumwa, where he can talk about the anxiety and depression caused by his Vietnam War service and deepened by the death of his wife, Victoria, last year. VA staff members there can also adjust the medicine he takes for post-traumatic stress disorder.

But he wants to see them more often, and he wishes there was a counselor he could call at night, when he hears the voices of his wife and his Army buddies hollering for help. Night is also when he catches himself pondering suicide.

“I’m having a heck of a time. I’m having a bad time of it,” said Hughes, 63. “If I had someone around here who I could call and get to them fairly quick … that would be awesome.”

The VA would pay for the Army veteran to seek assistance from a private counselor near his home — but there aren’t any. Cantril is in Van Buren County, a rural area without a single mental health provider. On most days, there are no psychiatrists, psychologists or mental health counselors of any stripe working in the southeast Iowa county.

State leaders hope their mental health redesign will bring better services to places like this, but many front-line administrators doubt they’ll see significant improvements soon. In fact, some worry that services could erode over the next year as money and some financial responsibilities are shifted from the counties to the state. Some long-term improvements are possible, they say, but cash likely will run short in the next few months.

Several counties plan to limit or create waiting lists for some services for mentally ill or disabled adults starting July 1, when the new fiscal year begins. State leaders have vowed to help counties avoid radical cuts, but some counties see no alternative. The cuts would come at the very time that local officials are supposed to be planning ways to improve mental health services under new regional authorities.

Van Buren County doesn’t plan immediate cuts, but its mental health coordinator wonders how the new system would help the county’s residents.

“I’m still not sure what the benefits are to regionalization. Does anyone know?” said Karen Riggle, who oversees social services for the county.

Riggle sees tangible ways to improve things. For example, she’s trying to persuade a psychiatrist who travels to the county once a month to come every week. She also believes that scarce psychiatric hospital beds could be put to better use if potential patients were screened more thoroughly before being committed, as the state plan proposes. But she doesn’t see how reorganizing administration would bring many new services to her isolated corner of the state. And she predicts that many people with serious mental illness or disabilities will continue to move to urban areas, which offer more services but take them away from the support of their families.

Van Buren County Sheriff Dan Tedrow has an up-close view of the problem, because he often becomes a key player when one of the county’s 8,000 residents has a mental health crisis.

Tedrow and his four deputies are the only law officers in the county. His jail is the sole secure spot to hold someone, because the hospital in Keosauqua lacks psychiatric beds. The sheriff’s dispatchers double as jailers, so they sometimes have to deal with a call about a mentally ill person in crisis in the community while also trying to calm someone with psychosis in the jail. “We are very under-manned and under-trained to deal with that, but nobody else wants to deal with it,” the sheriff said.

Tedrow’s deputies also sometimes have to transport mentally ill patients for hundreds of miles to find an open slot in a hospital psychiatric wing. The nearest such hospital is 60 miles away in Burlington, but its beds often are full, so patients have to be driven across the state. When no beds are available, people with mental illness sometimes have to sit in jail, even if they aren’t charged with crimes.

State leaders acknowledge the transition to the new system could be rocky in some places. “Some counties don’t see light at the end of the tunnel, and some counties are in the middle of daylight,” said state Sen. Jack Hatch, a Des Moines Democrat who helped lead Statehouse discussion of the new law. Hatch said some of the looming financial problems would have happened even without a new state law. He called the expected short-term financial crunch “a manageable issue.”

Hatch has pushed for years to reform Iowa’s mental health system, which is paid for with federal, state and county money and is run by a complicated array of public and private administrators. The arrangement prompted complaints that Iowans received different services depending on where they lived. Under the new law, signed by Gov. Terry Branstad in May, most counties are supposed to join new regional authorities, which will be required to offer “core services” across the state.

Chuck Palmer, director of the Iowa Department of Human Services, contends that the new regional systems should add efficiency, freeing up resources to add services. He recognizes the special challenges faced in rural areas, and he said solutions could include more use of video technology to allow doctors or counselors in cities to consult with patients in small towns.

Palmer said about 10 of Iowa’s 99 counties probably will be short of money for mental health and disability services starting in July, and others could feel a pinch. His staff is helping those counties try to rebalance their budgets, but he said some counties probably would have to trim services and start waiting lists. He said part of the problem was that some counties have used state Medicaid money to help pay for services Medicaid doesn’t normally cover, including services for people who aren’t quite poor enough to qualify. Starting in July, the state plans to keep the Medicaid money and use it to pay Medicaid bills that the counties used to handle.

Legislators plan to spend about $20 million to help counties make the transition, but that money won’t be appropriated until after lawmakers return to Des Moines next January. County leaders say they can’t wait until then to decide what they can spend in the budget year that starts next month.

Some of the deepest cuts are expected in Des Moines County, which is home to Burlington. The administrator there expects to be up to $2 million short, which he says will mean numerous cuts, including implementation of waiting lists for services and a reduction in group-home programs that could force some residents to find other places to live.

Polk County leaders don’t expect to have to make big cuts in the coming fiscal year, partly because Polk was the main beneficiary of a state decision to forgive millions of dollars in old bills that counties and the state were disputing. However, Polk’s neighbor to the north, Story County, does expect to cut services next month. Rep. Lisa Heddens, an Ames Democrat, said the county plans to start waiting lists for several services, cut legal help to clients and trimmed a program that offers care for people who are in crisis but aren’t ill enough to need expensive hospitalization –— even though such programs save money and are to be required in the future by the new law.

Heddens was heavily involved in forming the reform bill, but she voted against it in the end because of the expected financial jam it would cause in some counties. “I cannot and will not support legislation that cuts services to our most vulnerable Iowans. That is not progress, that’s a travesty,” she wrote in a letter to constituents.

The regional administration idea is already in use in northern Iowa, where eight counties have banded together to provide mental health services and eight more are poised to join them in July. Bob Lincoln, a Floyd County official who oversees the organization, said he expects his colleagues around the state to see the benefits as they join similar regional groups.

He said part of the consternation probably stems from concerns that some county administrators will lose their jobs. “Any time you talk about reorganization, people fear that’s a euphemism for slashing,” he said. But the state has committed to add money to the system over time, he said, and there will continue to be a need for knowledgeable staff members throughout Iowa.

Leaders of the state’s main advocacy group for people with mental illness say they are optimistic about the long-term effects of the law. “It’s not going to happen right away. Everybody wants to get the resources and the services right away, but they’ve got to get the framework set first,” said Theresa Bomhoff, a Des Moines volunteer for the Iowa chapter of that National Alliance on Mental Illness.

Bomhoff has closely monitored the years of discussions of reform, and she doesn’t want to see the effort torpedoed by early skepticism. “This is a first step, and we’ve got a long way to go, but we’ve got to hang together,” she said.

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