Decades after the US moved to deinstitutionalize behavioral healthcare—namely, closing psychiatric facilities in favor of community-based services—a growing number of policymakers and experts say more psych beds are key to fixing the country’s “mental health crisis.”

Lawmakers in states from Texas to New Hampshire have pushed to reopen shuttered inpatient beds or add new ones to meet the demand for behavioral health services, which grew during the Covid-19 pandemic. Some states—like New York and Virginia—are taking that a step further by expanding outpatient offerings at hospitals and clinics, funding supportive housing, and creating community treatment teams.

It’s not just happening at the state level. The Biden administration called for increasing mental health resources and providers in 2022, while Congress also included $4.25 billion for states to invest in psychiatric services in a 2021 spending bill.

“We’re starting to turn the culture and we now have funding coming out of the federal government much more so to address the shortages,” Robert Trestman, who chairs the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Council on Healthcare Systems and Financing, told Healthcare Brew. “The challenge is many jurisdictions aren’t prepared to pull together a comprehensive approach because they’ve never had the funding—didn’t have the people—to think it through. They’ve just been surviving.”

Advocates like Trestman have largely welcomed the increased public attention and funding for behavioral health initiatives and psych beds. They’ve said such scrutiny is necessary following years of underinvestment, even as some efforts yielded lackluster initial results.

Still, measuring the need for those services is tricky, both he and Jonathan Cantor, a Rand policy analyst who’s studied the issue, noted.

There’s no nationwide system for tracking psych beds and state-level data varies, complicating efforts to identify how many beds are available and to whom.

Keep reading here.—SY

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Our healthcare system isn’t exactly built for human-friendly navigation—and don’t even get us started on all of the paperwork.

It’s safe to say the system is under a lot of pressure. So how do we fix it? Join Healthcare Brew and GE HealthCare for a convo about reimagining a people-focused healthcare system.

With clinician burnout on the rise, patients seeking more flexible care, and an aging population, it’s time to revamp the healthcare system to how it should be: with people at its center. We’re teaming up GE HealthCare’s Chief Medical Officer for EMEA Dr. Mathias Goyen and healthcare journalist and author Sarah DiGregorio on June 27 to talk about it.

We’re covering everything from improving patient experience to prioritizing a care team’s well-being—and how tech and AI could possibly figure in.

Don’t miss out. RSVP here.

Almost every major health system in the US plans to prioritize hiring permanent staff over travel nurses as they look to fill “critical” staffing shortages, but not all are offering the benefits that would entice those nurses, according to a new analysis.

The findings from staffing company Incredible Health’s 2023 Healthcare Executive Report—which polled executives from 100 US hospitals and health systems in May—highlighted the disconnect between what nurses are looking for in employers, and what those employers are offering to hire and retain staff.

Closing that gap could be key for hospitals and other facilities, which are now competing for a relatively small pool of nurses amid staff shortages exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“The results of this report underline what we have heard from nurses on Incredible Health: They want more flexibility, the ability to relocate, career advancement opportunities, and an array of perks and benefits,” Incredible Health CEO and co-founder Iman Abuzeid told Healthcare Brew. “The health systems that implement strategies that reflect the desires of nurses are the ones that are hiring more, seeing lower turnover rates, and increasing retention.”

Abuzeid added that Incredible hopes the findings will help healthcare leaders “embrace the opportunity to change their nurse hiring and retention methods to improve the nurse experience, and ultimately patient care.”

More than nine in 10 (94%) respondents described the nursing shortage in their health systems as “critical,” and 68% said they lacked adequate staff to manage another major health crisis, like the pandemic. Meanwhile, 96% of health system executives said they plan to prioritize permanent nurse hires over temporary staff.

But just 11% of health systems said they offer more flexible nursing schedules—despite 80% of younger nurses requesting that from employers, the report found.

Keep reading here.—SY

The number of abortions performed in the US fell by almost 26,000 in the nine months after the Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to a report released Thursday.

The Society of Family Planning’s latest #WeCount analysis estimated that 25,640 fewer abortions took place between July 2022 and March 2023 (an average of about 2,849 fewer abortions each month), compared to the average monthly numbers observed prior to the court’s June 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling, which ended national abortion protections.

Those numbers are down from data #WeCount released in April, which estimated that abortions had dropped by an average of about 5,377 per month between July and December 2022—or 32,260 fewer cumulatively. (Though, the report noted, the pre-Dobbs numbers are likely an underestimate, since Texas’s six-week abortion ban was already in place then.)

Still, the new data underscores “the ways the Dobbs decision continues to devastate abortion access across the country, especially in states where abortion has been heavily restricted or banned,” Ushma Upadhyay, #WeCount cochair and professor at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program, said in a statement.

The findings:

• Fewer abortions occurred in seven of the nine months following Dobbs, compared to April 2022. November 2022 saw the largest decline, with 11,480 fewer abortions. Meanwhile, March 2023 saw the largest increase during the post-Dobbs period, with 8,930 more abortions.
• States with abortion bans saw the largest decrease in the procedure, with 65,920 fewer clinician-provided abortions in the months after Dobbs, compared to April 2022.
• The national abortion rate fell from 13.4 per 1,000 reproductive-age women in April 2022 to 12.6 per 1,000 in the nine months following Dobbs.

Keep reading here.—SY

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: An outbreak of dengue fever has surpassed 146,000 cases. (BBC)

Quote: “Everyone wakes in the middle of the night—just some people remember it more than others.”—Shelby Harris, a clinical associate professor of neurology and psychology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, on why women can have more sleep issues (the New York Times)

Read: An internal analysis from employees at Methodist University Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, found that “numerous errors” contributed to preventable deaths in the liver transplant program. (ProPublica)