(ABC 6 News) – A new report from the Center for Rural Policy and Development investigated what some of the biggest barriers for youth mental health access in Greater Minnesota are and what solutions are available to ease the problem.

The report discussed a variety of factors but one of the biggest was a significant lack of people willing to take the job.

Fernbrook Family Center in Rochester services 13 counties throughout southeast Minnesota, specializing in at-home/community care and skills building.

David Sabotta, the clinical training specialist for Fernbrook, trains every new employee that goes through the agency and says one of the toughest parts of his job now is keeping people around.

“Here in Rochester, we have pretty good luck finding people, and even then we fight to keep them,” Sabotta said. “It is incredibly difficult to find anyone for our more rural communities.”

This comes at a time when the adolescent mental health crisis has only gotten worse.

According to the 2022 Minnesota Student Survey, 45% of 11th grade girls said they experienced “long-term mental health, behavioral or emotional problems,” up from 35% just three years prior.

“It’s not necessarily that more kids are having mental health problems, but over the last 10-15 years they’ve gotten worse,” said Marnie Werner, vice president of research and operations for the CRPD.

In it’s research, the CRPD found one of the biggest factors contributing to the worker shortage has to do with reimbursement rates paid to service providers by the government through Medicaid or private insurance companies.

Those rates are determined through legislation, and in Minnesota they haven’t been adjusted in about 13 years.

“By inflation alone, that accounts for a 40% gap,” said Sabotta.

This creates a cycle: inability to pay workers enough to survive pushes them to urban areas, thereby leaving fewer providers in rural areas, despite a greater need.

“What happens in rural areas is there tends to be one hub,” said Hana El-Afandi, a social worker for the Grand Meadow Public School district in Mower County.

Mower’s hub is Austin, which is a 20 minute drive away from Grand Meadow.

That might not seem like a lot, but many parents in Grand Meadow work in Rochester making it difficult for them to get home and drive their child to a provider before they close, and that’s assuming they even have reliable transportation to begin with.

“To pick up a child and drive 30-40 minutes to an appointment and you have other kids at home too is hard to do regularly,” said El-Afandi.

The CRPD’s report gave several suggestions for potential solutions to help ease the crisis, including more education for parents and placing mental health professionals in primary care offices, but one solution Werner was particularly keen on was offering services directly in schools.

“It makes it just so much faster to connect a kid to some kind of help or they can go and talk to somebody,” she said.

Grand Meadow is one such school that has already been incorporating this idea, bringing Fernbrook therapists in to help combat the access issue.

“It takes away the barrier of time and it takes away the barrier of transportation,” El-Afandi said.

Something that can be crucial for parents and kids desperate for help, and what Sabotta says is one of the key missions for Fernbrook Family Center.

“We know from the neural network of the brain that if you are practicing skills in the same environment that you need to apply those skills it will be much easier to make that transfer,” he said.

The CRPD’s full report includes links to various organizations to find more information on how to learn about mental health needs and where you can find resources in your area.