Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- Utah's higher education reinvestment could help address shortage of mental health professionals, a top lawmaker said.
- House Speaker Mike Schultz sees opportunity to expand access to mental health programs.
- Audit reveals 70% of listed mental health providers are unavailable, likely frustrating patients.
SALT LAKE CITY — Reinvestment of higher education funds in Utah could help the state address its pressing need for more mental health professionals, according to the speaker of the Utah House of Representatives.
Utah's shortage of mental health professionals is no secret — a 2023 report from the Office of Professional Licensure found the state needs an additional 8,000 mental health workers to meet current demand — and lawmakers have worked to address it by lowering some barriers to who can be licensed to practice certain treatments.
That same report said a lack of capacity in graduate programs can serve as a "bottleneck" to licensing more therapists. House Speaker Mike Schultz, R-Hooper, said the recent "strategic reinvestment" bill for higher education is a good opportunity to address those problems.
"Higher education is going through a realignment right now and focusing on growing some programs," he said during a Legislative Audit Subcommittee meeting this week. "With some of the restructuring that we passed last session, behavioral health is probably one of the biggest holes out there in our economy right now and in the workforce."
In response to a presentation from legislative auditors on a report on the state of the behavioral health workforce in Utah, Schultz asked the head of Utah's Department of Health and Human Services if she is working with higher education institutions to expand programs to recruit more mental health specialists.
Director Tracy Gruber said those conversations are happening "not only for the behavioral health workforce but also for the health workforce in general, in making sure that our universities are establishing that track."
Schultz urged the Utah Behavioral Health Commission to work with higher education to "expand opportunities as they're going through this realignment process."
"I really think that there could be some good outcomes and try to train and get more mental health professionals into the career," he added.
The audit itself is the second report on the state's mental health system presented to state lawmakers in the past year, after an October report detailed the lack of central oversight of various health systems in the state. Thursday's report noted that investments have been made, but said coordination across the state remains an issue and that more data is needed to fully understand workforce challenges across the state.
Auditors said they tried to determine how accessible mental health professionals are to some Utahns on private insurance, and said as many as 70% of mental health providers listed could be considered "ghost providers" — or providers who are "listed in a health plan's directory as accepting new patients that are effectively unavailable to an enrollee," according to McKenzie Cantlon, audit supervisor.
Auditors randomly called more than 180 providers listed in health directories and tried to make an appointment, but were unable to do so more often than not. A plurality of those "ghost providers," 35%, said they were not accepting new patients, while a quarter were listed with a wrong number and 14% did not answer calls from the auditors.
That is in line with a 2024 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found that 72% of parents said "problems getting an appointment" for their child was the main reason they did not seek necessary mental health services.
"As you can imagine, someone ... on one of these plans, it would be very frustrating if you finally decided to seek services that you had to call over and over and over again to try to access an appointment," Cantlon said.
Senate Majority Leader Luz Escamilla, D-Salt Lake City, expressed concern with those findings, saying, "It's telling if that's going to be the experience in a critical moment of your life, which is when you're probably seeking some of this mental, behavioral health access."
Federal law requires commercial health plans to update their provider directories every 90 days, but states are responsible for enforcing those laws and the report states "Utah code is currently silent on this topic" and the state regulatory agency "only investigates directory inaccuracies when it receives a consumer complaint."
The report recommends lawmakers consider changing state law for online directories to include accuracy requirements and add state oversight.
