Recruitment and Retention of Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder Clinical Staff: Barriers to Patient Treatment

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, there has been a marked increase in clients seeking behavioral health services (mental health and substance use disorder treatment) and a simultaneous decrease in clinicians entering and remaining in the field. We seek to address the difficulties of recruitment and retention of clinical staff in behavioral health. Recruitment and retention of clinical staff present many challenges and the complexity of the issues impacting these challenges is not fully understood. We created a survey and collected data to identify the recruitment and retention challenges in organizations offering behavioral health services throughout New England. We surveyed a key program staff person, identified by the organization, from each program that offers substance use disorder treatment and/or mental health services and we used grounded theory techniques to assess themes and patterns pre- and post-COVID-19 to attempt to attach meaning to our findings. We found that clinical staff were seeking more flexibility in treatment models, agency support for increasingly challenging jobs, and acknowledgement that salary expectations have evolved in a way that both treatment programs and insurance reimbursement models were unable to meet, with the structures that were in place.