Staffing Shortages Affect Mental Health Access at UWM and Statewide

At UW-Milwaukee, there are 14 counselors for about 24,000 students. The university is attempting to fill the gaps.

“Everywhere besides Madison is understaffed,” said Carrie Fielder, director of counseling at UWM.

Approximately 1,200 students, roughly 5% of the student body, received counseling last year.

UWM is legally required to provide equal access to students with disabilities, and usually those students go through ARC to get their individual accommodation plans. The accommodation plans can include academic flexibility on attendance and due dates, assistive technology, service animals, communication access, note taking services and more.

In November, Nigel Rothfels, acting dean of the College of Letters and Science at UWM, sent an email to faculty and staff letting them know that students currently seeking accommodation plans at the Accessibility Resource Center (ARC) will likely not receive accommodations before the end of the semester. In the email, Rothfels encouraged instructors to work directly with students to discuss accommodations.

Rothfels wrote that staffing issues are to blame for long wait times on accommodations.

Before this change, students would submit requests for accommodation through ARC, and they could do so online. Now students must forgo the center and work through their accommodations with their teachers.

Mental Health in Milwaukee

When Sierra Coenen, 21, moved to Milwaukee, she searched online for a therapist and psychologist. After finding a provider that took her insurance and waiting a week to hear back from them, she learned her first appointment would not be for over a month. Now Coenen must schedule every appointment one month, sometimes two, in advance.

“It’s difficult because sometimes when I need to get in, I can’t,” said Coenen.

Granite Hills Hospital in West Allis opened in January to serve adults and started accepting adolescent patients in October. Deanna Meyer, the director of business management at Granite Hills, said their biggest obstacle since opening has been finding staff.

According to a December 2021 report by the Kaiser Family Foundation, the need for mental health access is more important than in past years. Over 30% of adults in the U.S. reported symptoms of anxiety and/or depressive disorder, up from 11% of adults prior to the pandemic.

“We’re not always able to accept every patient that requires inpatient admission, because we don’t have the capacity to treat based on our staffing levels right now,” said Deanna Meyer, director of business management at Granite Hills Hospital in West Allis.

Rogers Behavioral Health, a non-for-profit behavioral and mental health treatment and research organization, reporting in their 2022 Community Assessment that Milwaukee has a treatment gap of 57%, meaning out of the reported 134,282 residents in Wisconsin who suffer from mental illness, only 56,808 received treatment for mental health issues.

The most popular service at Granite Hills Hospital is in-patient care, but they have restricted the number of beds available until they find more staff.

Right now, at 40% operation, they have 34 in-patient beds. When they are fully operational, they will have 120.

In-patient programs are popular at Rogers Behavioral Health in West Allis, but Rogers is not experiencing the same staffing shortages that Granite Hills and UWM Counseling are facing. Rogers has locations throughout the country, and seven in Wisconsin.

In Wisconsin, Rogers offers intensive in-patient care in Oconomowoc, Brown Deer, and West Allis.

Rogers in West Allis has around 170 patients at different levels of care, about 100 are at varying levels of inpatient care, and around 70 are in outpatient programs.

“We haven’t experienced anything critical as far as critical shortages without continuing but we do recognize that it’s something that is an issue throughout the country in different healthcare settings,” said Derrick Ellis, vice president of operations at Rogers in West Allis.

Ellis believes they aren’t struggling with staffing shortages because Rogers works more directly with universities in Wisconsin to push jobs to new graduates. 

Rogers is enlisting workers through universities, an idea that Meyer thinks would help staffing at Granite Hills.

“I think it’s about starting in the schools and, you know, exposing them to the possibility of a career in helping patients with mental health needs,” said Meyer.

Rogers is working to tackle other issues regarding mental health in Milwaukee. Rogers 2022 Community Assessment reports that Milwaukee County has low high school graduation and broadband access rates, and high food and housing insecurity rates compared to other Wisconsin counties.

Rogers says these are contributing factors to mental illness in individuals and affect their access to care.

Ellis says reevaluating current programs is the best way to make sure a community’s needs are being met.

“It’s not all about just opening up a certain program and saying, alright, well we build it,” Ellis continued, “We do robust analysis. We work with different agencies to help us determine what programs we need to open up and those that we need to expand in certain markets in this region.”

UWM Counseling’s most popular program is a single-issue problem solving session called “Let’s Talk.”

“It’s not a therapy session,” Fielder said.

The program allows students to meet with UWM counselors for brief and informal 20-minute meetings. Students can talk about anything: stress, sadness, relationship problems, academic anxieties.

Before COVID, the program had counselors go to different places around campus and students could have a meeting one-on-one for about half an hour.

During COVID, “Let’s Talk” transitioned online and is fully virtual.

“What we found was it made access just so much easier that people really utilized “Let’s Talk,” like, three times as much as they had when we were doing it in person,” said Fielder.

UWM and the UW system are opening new programs that will be available to students in the next six months.

Looking Forward

The UW System received one-time funding of $5 million from Gov. Tony Evers through pandemic relief funds. The UW System decided to use that money for additional mental health resources.

The services provided by Mantra Health will not impact any existing services provided by UWM counseling.