The Regional Mental Health Coordinator for Southern Health says hiring more psychologists is just not a realistic option in rural areas of the province.

Tina Cordell is reacting to a review of the province’s health care system conducted by consultant Dr. David Peachey. The report recommends investing more in positions for clinical psychologists who would be more involved in general patient care. Cordell says although it would be nice to have more psychologists, that’s just not something that’s realistic here in Southern Health.

"It’s very very hard to hire psychologists into rural areas. Winnipeg might have more success in that but as I said, we had a vacancy of going on two and a half years in Portage because we couldn’t recruit a psychologist to provide rural Manitoba service."

The Peachey report also indicates Manitoba has an average of 19 clinical psychologists for every 100,000 while in the Southern Health there are only two psychologists in the entire region of about 200,000 people. Cordell explains the role psychologists play here in southern health. 

"I guess the difference here is the way we have our mental health programs set up in Southern Health which is very different to what they have established in Winnipeg. Psychologists here in our region are consultants to our program and it’s our mental health workers who actually deliver the primary treatments for behavioral and mental health problems."

Cordell says the community mental health workers are individuals with academic credentialing. "They could be psychiatric nurses, they could be social workers, they could be people who have a masters in counseling/psychology" noted Cordell. She adds a variety of educational backgrounds can qualify a person to provide psychosocial assessments as well as the therapies.

"When we’re talking about a clinical psychologist, this is a person who has a doctoral level so they have a Ph.D. and they have that additional assessment to do things like testing for example like personality testing, those kinds of higher level psychological testing to come up with higher level diagnoses."

Cordell notes the community mental health workers that are hired into the program are educated and qualified to do assessments but not that psychosocial assessment that a psychologist does.