Background

Rural and underserved communities often suffer from limited access to specialty mental health services. Provider organizations struggle to recruit and retain mental health specialists and often find it necessary to arrange for regular visits by a mental health consultant with considerable travel costs and limited on-site specialty clinician availability. Non-mental health providers are often placed in the position of serving patients with severe mental health problems with little or no specialty support. All of these factors reduce the quality of mental health services available to patients in rural and underserved communities, sometimes forcing patients to travel long distances to obtain mental health services, or forgo such services altogether.