Milwaukee, Racine Counties Need More Access To Mental Health Help

ACROSS WISCONSIN— A newly released report Monday by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) highlights the need for Psychiatrists in both Milwaukee and Racine Counties.

The DHS Primary Care Program is responsible for tracking health care professional shortages in Wisconsin, including psychiatrists, and coordinating federal grants targeted to address these shortages.

The most recent available data on psychiatrist shortage areas is from March 2019.

A shortage designation can then be calculated to determine if an area can qualify for Health Professional Shortage Area federal funding. A significant shortage means having a ratio of 10,000 population to one full-time equivalent psychiatrist or higher. A 20,000 to one full-time equivalent ratio is required to qualify for a federal designation as a Health Professional Shortage Area and be eligible for federal benefits.

Racine County needs an additional 14 providers to close the gap. Milwaukee County needs 37.

Highlights of the report include:

All but six counties have some level of psychiatrist shortages.

Although almost all rural areas have shortages of psychiatrists, larger counties have the largest shortages. The counties with the ten largest full-time equivalent shortages all have populations over 100,000 with the exception of St. Croix County.

The counties with the largest shortages are Milwaukee, Outagamie, andRacine.

Milwaukee County has a shortage of 36.5 full-time equivalent psychiatrists which is more than three times larger than the next county with a shortage.

Of the six counties with an adequate supply of psychiatrists, all are counties with a large urban area with the exception of Green County.

Waukesha and Dane are estimated to have a combined surplus of 144 psychiatrists with the majority of the surplus residing in Dane County.

Without the ability to relocate any full-time equivalent psychiatrists from where they are currently practicing, Wisconsin needs 117 more full-time equivalent psychiatrists statewide. However, if some psychiatrists were able to relocate from Dane and Waukesha counties, it is possible that the shortages could be eliminated, according to the report. Although relocation for all surplus psychiatrists in these two counties is unlikely, the use of telehealth, when appropriate, could be used by psychiatrists in surplus areas to help address the need in shortage areas.

Two federal block grants bring approximately $11 million in mental health and $28 million in substance use services funds to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) each year. This needs assessment is used by DHS to inform ongoing program and policy planning as well as to develop funding and program priorities for the federal fiscal year 2021-2022 applications for the Community Mental Health Services Block Grant and Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant.

DHS publishes a needs assessment report every other year that is an accumulation of indicators from state and national data sets. This report features fewer indicators than previous reports because it is designed to complement the 2019 Wisconsin Behavioral Health System Gaps Report. The 2019 Wisconsin Behavioral Health System Gaps Report is a one-time report commissioned by DHS and written by the UW-Madison Population Health Institute that assessed needs and offered solutions based on the knowledge and experience of stakeholders in the mental health and substance use services system through interviews, surveys, and focus groups.