The House gave preliminary approval to this year’s comprehensive mental health bill, S.133, on a vote of 134-0. The bill is on track to pass Friday, before moving back over to the Senate.
S.133, which passed the Senate on March 30, calls on the Agency of Human Services to perform a comprehensive review of Vermont’s mental health system. The bill also requires the Office of Professional Regulation to make it easier for mental health providers licensed in other states to practice in Vermont.
An early version of the legislation sought to increase pay for workers at quasi-public mental health agencies. That language has been removed from this bill, to be handled instead as part of the budget process. The Senate’s budget calls for a $9.8 million increase during the upcoming fiscal year.
At the time of the discussion on the floor, the Department of Mental Health reported that there were four adult psychiatric patients waiting in hospital emergency rooms for inpatient beds to become available. The data includes only the people the state is aware of, so there could be more.
“In many of our hospitals across the state, and almost all of our hospitals across the state, on a very regular basis adults — and sometimes children — linger for days in the emergency departments and emergency rooms of our hospital settings while awaiting access,” Rep. Bill Lippert, D-Hinesburg, said on the House floor.
Lippert said lawmakers have heard about “anguish” from constituents who are family members of the people waiting in emergency rooms. He said the patients “are in need of serious mental health care but are not able to access that because they are simply sitting in the emergency department.”
Lippert said the patients are waiting “many times with no special care at all, and sometimes simply accompanied by hired aides, or even — in instances we’ve heard — sometimes bringing in custodial staff essentially to sit with them while they wait for days for inpatient care.”
Rep. Anne Donahue, R-Northfield, said the emergency room situation goes back to when flooding from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 caused the closure of the state psychiatric hospital in Waterbury. She called it “an ongoing, severe crisis … that’s very traumatic for the patients and also for the staff.”
Donahue said S.133 keeps the state working toward a health care system that includes mental health care. “It’s essential to have a long-term vision of what that really looks like, because if you don’t have a long-term vision, you don’t know if you’re taking the right steps along the way,” she said.
Also on Thursday the House gave preliminary approval to another version of H.184, which seeks to find out why Vermonters take their own lives. A version of that bill has already passed the Senate.
The House also gave preliminary approval to a new version of H.230. The Senate revised that bill to allow minors to get outpatient mental health treatment without their parents’ consent. The House decided to delay the implementation of that from July 1 to Jan. 1.
Over in the Senate, members tacked on the exact language from the House’s version of H.197, an expansion of workers’ compensation to cover mental health, to another bill related to workers’ compensation insurance, S.56.
Workers’ compensation does not currently cover mental health unless there is a physical injury associated with it, and a 2003 Vermont Supreme Court decision denies first responders workers’ compensation coverage for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Senate leaders predict the House will concur with the H.197 language contained in S.56 without further debate.
