HEALTH CARE: Some sick realities

In an article published in November, Mike Baker, CEO of Heritage Health stated, “Our biggest challenge is finding qualified therapists; there’s a real shortage of mental health care professionals in our community. We pretty much hire a therapist every 90 days.”

I worked for Heritage Health as a mental health therapist from 2015 until earlier this year. Our community actually has many well-qualified, compassionate, and dedicated masters-level therapists and psychiatric prescribers. Several therapists including myself have left Heritage recently. This seems to indicate a retention problem, not a recruitment problem. I left a career I loved because I was being asked to provide care in a way that goes against my professional training and personal values.

What happened? An increasing list of documentation demands that could not be met by any reasonable human being within work hours; feeling conflicted by what was best for my clients versus the agency, the insurance company or some other oversight entity; the realization that I couldn’t provide the type of quality mental health services I wanted to in a business-oriented, revenue-driven model of health care.

Heritage Health’s leadership knows the impact our broken health care system is having on their providers; several of us have been telling them for years directly and indirectly via our resignations. It’s time to listen to us and change the delivery of health care so that the focus returns to care instead of revenue and so medical and mental health professionals can do what they do best — help people.

REBECCA WHITE, LCPC

Coeur d’Alene