(The Center Square ) — Working in the addiction recovery field, experts warned Pennsylvania lawmakers that burdensome rules and college degree requirements make it harder to help vulnerable people.
The labor shortage is so severe that the Department of Drug and Alcohol Programs has paid off $19 million in student loan debt on behalf of their workers, and leaders plan to expand the program.
“Doing what we normally do is not working,” Sen. Michele Brooks, R-Greenville, said during a Senate Health and Human Services committee hearing on Wednesday. She said the “sheer volume of drugs crossing our borders annually” drives the overdose crisis and called on the federal government to do more.
“We have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and have little to show for it,” she said.
Finding workers is a major problem. The hardest jobs to fill, DDAP Secretary Latika Davis-Jones noted, are counselors, nurses, and peer recovery specialists.
“DDAP has already taken steps … by supporting student loan repayments in the amount of $19 million to 274 grantees, the commonwealth still has a long road ahead in securing and rebuilding a workforce,” Davis-Jones said.
The department is also looking to expand the program in the coming year.
However, one problem is that too many addiction recovery jobs require a college degree, barring people with experience from getting hired – people in recovery and family members of those in recovery.
“My BA and my master’s didn’t prepare me one iota to work in this field,” Deb Beck, president of the Drug and Alcohol Service Providers Organization of Pennsylvania, said. “The degree guarantees no expertise in addiction.”
What matters more, she said, is getting people internships and putting people to work who know the problems that people battling addiction face.
“They know all about addiction in a way straight people will never know,” Beck said.
She also cautioned legislators that much of the oversight mechanisms in place miss what’s important.
“We’re measuring the wrong things all the time,” Beck said. “Length of stay and retention, and ease of access should be the measures … our incentives are crazy — they’re punishing and we need to change them.”
The result of poor measurements and regulations creates a swarm of audits and paperwork.
“The collection of regulations is outdated and many of them, especially in a workforce crisis, are illogical and burdensome,” Jason Snyder, director of substance use disorder treatment services for the Rehabilitation and Community Providers Association, said. “These regs do little to nothing to ensure safety or enhance quality.”
He noted that some providers can face more than a dozen audits from state and federal authorities every year, creating a hefty administrative burden for repetitive reports, a point he has previously made.
“This is not a system with an eye toward patient outcomes, but rather a system forcing providers to focus on paper over clinical work,” Snyder said.
For its part, DDAP has been on an engagement tour statewide to hear the concerns of providers and experts, and how to improve the commonwealth’s rules and deal with staffing problems.
“Moving forward, under my leadership we will continue to conduct a thorough review of our regulations and reform policies which cause unnecessary burdens,” Davis-Jones said.
A common refrain across Pennsylvania’s government and economy has been hiring problems due to low salaries, be it for prisons, the Department of Labor & Industry, and EMS. Likewise for recovery services, but Beck suggested a solution.
“If I were king for a day, I would take the 15% of the opioid settlement that the state kept for itself and dedicate it only to counselor — clinical supervisor, counselor assistant — salaries,” she said. “Let’s pay these people what they’re worth.”
