PITTSBURG, Texas — While the national focus is on access to healthcare resources for COVID-19, access to mental health resources is just as important. About 58% of the people living in Northeast Texas live in rural areas where those mental health resources are not as easy to access.
A new program at The UT Health Science Center at Tyler aims to change this.
Back in July of 2019, the UT Health Science Center at Tyler received a $750,000 grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration to begin a residency program for mental health in rural East Texas.
Within the last few weeks that program received accreditation, meaning they have approval to begin their work at the UT Health East Texas Pittsburg location.
Dr. Emmanuel Elueze is the Vice President for Medical Education and Professional Development at the UT Health Science Center at Tyler. He says the East Texas community has an acute need for mental health care.
“We know that at least 85,000 individuals in East Texas have serious mental health disorder," Elueze said. "We know that the suicide rate in East Texas is higher than the state average. So in summary, mental health is a big problem for our community.”
Elueze says this new program will allow resident doctors to continue their training while they give much needed psychological help to the rural East Texas community.
"The program will help us to begin to provide mental health care for people in our rural community," Elueze said. "Because these residents, even during the training will begin to contribute to the provision of mental health care.”
The program will reside at the UT Health East Texas Pittsburg location, where Elueze says the mental health initiative will mesh nicely with current hospital programs.
“We have a rural family medicine program in place already. That program is about four or five years old now," Elueze said. "It has been in Pittsburg now for two years. And we think that they will complement one another well."
Elueze says the program has already received high praise from the people in charge of accrediting the program.
“The site visitor told me that he's been going around the country and seen a lot of people talking about what to do for rural community health," Elueze said. "But this was the first place that he was coming to that we don't just talk about what we wanted to do for rural community health, we were actually doing something about it."
UT Health Science Center at Tyler says one of the main focuses of this program is to keep residents they train here in East Texas, so they can continue to expand healthcare resources in the region.