Simulating the impact of psychologist prescribing authority policies on mental health prescriber shortages.

Abstract

This study simulated the impact of granting prescriptive authority to licensed psychologists on shortages of mental health providers with prescriptive authority. We used national and state-level secondary data to construct a policy simulation. Mental health prescribing need and the number of mental health prescribers were estimated at the national and state levels, and the provider shortage was calculated as the difference between these two values. The simulated policy intervention added 10% of psychologists to the prescriber group to estimate the associated reduction in prescriber shortages. Probabilistic uncertainty and sensitivity analyses were conducted