Primary care providers get advice hotline for supporting youth mental health care
VTDigger
On any given day, Alexandra Bannach, a pediatrician in Newport, will have three or four patients scheduled to see her for a check-in about ongoing mental health treatment, most commonly for depression or anxiety. That’s true of her three colleagues as well.
Meanwhile, about half of the annual visits with teens and pre-teens throughout the rest of her work day reveal symptoms that might result in a mental health diagnosis. The number of those cases and their severity has increased dramatically in the past half decade, she said. That led her practice team to decide last year to extend the amount of time they take with each adolescent patient.
“We just needed more time in those rooms,” said Bannach, who has worked at North Country Pediatrics for 18 years. “It’s not just doing a physical (exam) anymore and saying, ‘you’re cleared for sports.’ You have to address mental health issues and with those, obviously, there’s no blood tests. It’s really sitting down and talking.”