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Lawmakers Focus on Mental Health

Valley News - 5/27/2017

VtDigger

Montpelier — While lawmakers have spent previous years looking at ways to reform health care delivery, such reform took a back seat this year as they grappled with shortfalls in the state’s mental health system.

House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, D-South Hero, and Sentate President Pro Tempore Tim Ashe, D/P-Chittenden, had already prioritized some parts of mental health care — realigning oversight of mental health care to promote parity and overturning a controversial court decision.

But in February, shortly after the session started, mental health care took center stage. The House and Senate held a joint hearing to find out from state workers what was going on in the public part of the mental health care system, such as the Vermont Psychiatric Care Hospital in Berlin.

The hearing didn’t focus on that one hospital. Instead, doctors and nurses from several of Vermont’s community hospitals told lawmakers that their patients are not getting the mental health care they need, and that they were burning out at their jobs.

They testified that the ongoing situation in which psychiatric patients — including children — are held in emergency rooms while they wait for appropriate treatment has spiraled out of control.

Years ago, they said, it was rare for patients to wait in emergency rooms, but years after Tropical Storm Irene destroyed the state’s psychiatric hospital in 2011, they said that boarding psychiatric patients in emergency room has become “the de facto policy of the state of Vermont.”

The Senate Health and Welfare Committee responded by spearheading a big-picture mental health bill, S. 133. The bill will require the Agency of Human Services to perform a deep dive into the state’s mental health system and submit an action plan for improvement to the Legislature.

The committee also advocated for millions of dollars in additional funding for workers at publicly funded mental health agencies. The committee originally sought more than $30 million for the workers, whose advocates have complained for years are burning out or moving to other jobs because of the low pay.

The money in the Senate Health and Welfare Committee’s original plan would have been used to pay workers a minimum of $15 an hour and to pay salaried mental health workers more comparably to mental health workers employed by the state, by school districts, or by hospitals.

During the budget process, the Appropriations Committee brought that number below $10 million and called for a multi-year process for increasing funding for the mental health agencies.

In the final version of the budget, lawmakers approved $8.3 million in increased pay for mental health workers.

The Senate Judiciary Committee also spearheaded S. 3, a bill that overturns the decision Kuligoski v. Brattleboro Retreat, a controversial case that alleged mental health providers were negligent in how much training they gave to caretakers of a schizophrenic man who eventually assaulted someone else.

The Vermont Supreme Court allowed that case to move forward just months before the legislative session started. Mental health providers interpreted the decision as putting new burdens on them. The bill would require their “duty to warn” to stay the same as it has since 1985.