Sacred Heart to receive two additional resident psychiatrists

A year after shutting down its psychiatric center for children and adolescents due to a staffing shortage, Providence Health Care announced it will begin welcoming two additional resident psychiatrists each year.

The positions will be funded by the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and driven by a growing demand for mental health services in the community. Psychiatrists have been in particularly high demand since the coronavirus pandemic, Sacred Heart’s Dr. Rick Carlson said, which seemed to see a reduction in stigma surrounding treatment.

“I think as more and more people are comfortable or just in need of psychiatric services,” he said, “I would expect that demand is going to continue to increase.”

Where there were previously four psychiatry residency students per four-year cohort with a fifth joining in the second year, six of over 500 applicants will be selected March 20 to begin their residencies at Sacred Heart Medical Center. There will not be a seventh joining in the second year under the new model.

“Psychiatry has one of the highest percentages of graduates who stay in the area where they train,” Carlson said, adding that increasing the number of residents therefore also raises the likelihood of the region maintaining more psychiatrists.

Sacred Heart is a particularly good place for training, he said, due to its “massive catchment area.”

“So we have people from all over the place, but often very medically complex patients,” he said. “And so having more physicians, psychiatrists who have trained in a setting where you get really comfortable managing really medically complex patients with psychiatric symptoms – I think it’s really important.”

Additionally, accepting more residents should loan itself to training more child psychiatrists in particular for Providence.

Though unable to comment on the 2024 closure of Sacred Heart’s inpatient Psychiatric Center for Children and Adolescents, which Providence previously told The Spokesman-Review was the result of insufficient child psychiatry staff, Carlson said the loss of the center led to “a real, overt goal of trying to support child and adolescent psychiatry in the region.”

Specifically, Carlson said more support for adolescent psychiatry would mean more primary care providers rather than ambulatory support.

“That goes a long way towards helping kids avoid being in the hospital,” he said.

In an emailed statement, Providence wrote: “Our focus is on building the right resources in the right settings to support kids before they reach a crisis.”

In the time after the Psychiatric Center for Children and Adolescents’ closure, a 12-year-old girl died by suicide during a stay at Sacred Heart, where she was waiting for long-term psychiatric care facility placement.

But getting more child psychiatry trained staff is no easy feat.

A typical psychiatry student will spend four years in their residency, while a child and adolescent psychologist needs an additional two years for specialized training. All together, a newly graduated high schooler can generally expect to spend about 13 years working towards becoming a child and adolescent psychologist.

Providence has a fellowship option that drops that training down to 12 years, but with the previous four total residents, the fellowship essentially relied on half of each resident class applying to consistently fill positions.

“So having the two additional residents really increases the likelihood that we’ll be able to continue to consistently fill our fellowship positions, which is good for our residency program,” Carlson said. It’s good for our fellowship. It’s great for the community to have more fellows and train more future child and adolescent psychiatrists.”

Increasing residency capacity is a “huge win,” he said.

“I’m a very biased person, of course, but I think we have a really excellent training program,” he said. “It’s really exciting.”