ORHPC Spotlight: Equitable access to mental health care - Minnesota Department of Health

The face of Minnesota is changing:
Supporting equitable access to mental health care

As Minnesota’s population becomes more diverse, individual and community health care needs continue to evolve. Responding to the need for culturally responsive mental health care, the Office of Rural Health and Primary Care (ORHPC), with funding from the state legislature, launched the Mental Health Cultural Community Continuing Education (MHCCCE) grant program.

Nearly 1.3 million Minnesotans, or 22% of Minnesota's population, are people of color, and this number is projected to increase by another one million in the next 30 years.^[i] The Minnesota chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) explains that multicultural communities face unique challenges in accessing mental health treatment and receiving care that is free from racism, homophobia, and other biases. Communities may experience misperceptions about mental illnesses, discrimination, and language barriers, and the health care system can be culturally insensitive.^[ii]

The lack of diverse representation among mental health providers has become critical in Minnesota as the workforce does not reflect the population they serve. Data shown below was collected from October 2021 to October 2022 through the MDH Healthcare Workforce Survey, and broadly shows the racial makeup of mental health professionals in Minnesota.

Table 1: Racial makeup of mental health professionals in Minnesota

“Diversifying the mental health profession is critical for working toward health equity and closing the gap in who receives mental health care,” said Salina Renninger, PhD, LP, Associate Professor and Director of Training, Graduate School of Professional Psychology at University of St. Thomas.

Having the option of choosing a provider who shares a cultural lens – who speaks the same language and understands the unique challenges – may help people of color and members of other underrepresented communities overcome barriers to seeking mental health care. Increasing the number of mental health supervisors who are from underrepresented communities is one way that ORHPC hopes to make a difference.

In 2022, ORHPC awarded the first round of grants to individual mental health professionals and to culturally responsive training programs to support free continuing education credits that will meet the training requirements to become a supervisor.^[iii] In all, ORHPC expects to support more than 400 individuals in reaching supervisory status by 2024. According to individual recipient Mugesi Ogongi, a licensed LPCC:

The MHCCCE program will help me in achieving my professional goal of attaining supervision training and certification. Clinical supervision had been my long-term goal after graduating from college, but it had become so expensive for me to afford supervision requirements as a person of color with low income.

Besides increasing the numbers of individuals who can serve Minnesota’s diverse communities with culturally appropriate care, this new cohort of supervisors will guide the next generation of practitioners as leaders in their fields of practice. The MHCCCE Individual program aims to assist professionals like Vicenta del Carmen Valero, LPCC, Licensed Alcohol and Drug Counselor (LADC), to “pay it forward”:

As a professional of color, the process towards licensure was daunting and at times felt unattainable. Were it not for the wonderful supervisors who guided me and allowed me to develop a professional identity that speaks to who I am, I'm not sure that I would have completed the process. This grant provided me the opportunity to pursue Supervision Licensure which will allow me to support other clinicians of color in their journey.

Through sharing their experience-based knowledge on how best to provide mental health services that consider a client’s background, these leaders will mentor new practitioners and attract underrepresented students into mental health fields. The importance of these professionals having access to and receiving culturally responsive training was summed up by Larry Tucker, LMFT and CEO of Kente Circle, LLC:

We know there is a lack of capacity in the ‘helping fields’ to respond to the racialized trauma and needs of diverse communities. Most mental health providers, educators, and social workers, whether white or of color, are trained mainly by white teaching staff, learn theories developed based on work done with white people, and participate in internships and practicums where most of the client base is white. Mental health professionals of color are perhaps best equipped to provide the clinical and therapeutic supports to address many types of violence occurring in our communities, and they are largely underrepresented, particularly in positions of leadership or as supervisors.

Eligible professionals^[iv] can contact one of the following programs for more information on upcoming training sessions.

Programs conducting training sessions:

Endnotes