Licensed community mental health clinics are the backbone of the behavioral health system in Massachusetts. In hundreds of communities statewide, patients get the care they need from a multidisciplinary team of professionals to treat their symptoms and get better.
While these clinics are such a vital piece of behavioral health infrastructure, they are losing the ability to recruit and retain clinicians – resulting in care delayed, and in some cases, care denied.
Most people know that we have a mental health “boarding” crisis in our hospital emergency rooms, but fewer people know the cause. While there are a limited number of psychiatric beds for patients needing that level of care, and thus those in crisis must wait for a bed to open, many patients have reached the acute stage of care because they were not able to get access to less intensive, most cost-effective care in the community.
