Kids’s hospitals ask Congress to handle psychological well being, staffing considerations

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Dive Temporary:

• Kids’s hospitals throughout the nation are calling on Congress to assist handle youngsters’s psychological well being and care-access points as legislators wrap up the yr, in response to a letter final week from the Kids’s Hospital Affiliation.
• The foyer is searching for boosted Medicaid reimbursements for pediatric psychological well being companies and devoted funding for the pediatric psychological well being workforce by grants as ongoing staffing shortages persist, in response to the letter. 
• The group additionally needs to make sure youngsters on the Kids’s Well being Insurance coverage Program (CHIP) stay coated amid looming eligibility redeterminations tied to the COVID-19 public well being emergency.

Dive Perception:

The requests come as youngsters’s hospitals face an inflow of sufferers with respiratory diseases, the flu and psychological well being situations, CHA CEO Mark Wietecha stated in a press release.

“Congressional motion is urgently wanted earlier than the tip of the yr to make sure youngsters’s hospitals have the assets and capability they should greatest deal with our nation’s youngsters,” he stated.

Final yr, the foyer, which represents 220 youngsters’s hospitals, declared a nationwide state of emergency over youngster and adolescent psychological well being, “and hospitals proceed to see this firsthand of their emergency departments,” the letter stated.

Rhode Island has reported that pediatric beds in its state are at capability and different states have stated occupancy charges of 90% and better.

Staffing shortages throughout the healthcare workforce are half of what’s exacerbating that drawback at youngsters’s hospitals.

The CHA requested for $718.8 million for fiscal yr 2023 and a $200 million one-time enhance in appropriations to assist fund the Kids’s Hospital Graduate Medical Training Program, which supplies pediatric-specific coaching at youngsters’s instructing hospitals.

The group additionally requested greater Medicaid reimbursement to assist retain current youngsters’s psychological well being care suppliers and appeal to extra suppliers into the occupation.

Defending CHIP protection is one other key ask. The CHA needs Congress to increase 12-month steady eligibility for youngsters who might face protection gaps as a consequence of short-term shifts in family eligibility necessities, and earlier than public well being emergency waivers wind down.

The CHA famous in its letter that funding would assist cut back gaps in federal investments for physicians coaching in grownup care versus youngsters’s care.