Marley Doyle, MD, director of the Behavioral Health Education Center of Nebraska, and Melissa Tibbits, PhD, BHECN associate director for research and evaluation, recently discussed the Licensed Behavioral Health Workforce Report 2025 on the latest episode of the Behavioral Health Matters podcast.
The podcast is hosted by the Nebraska Association of Behavioral Health Organizations and its executive director, Nicki Behmer Popp.
A main goal of the report is to provide data that helps BHECN, policymakers, educators and other stakeholders craft workforce solutions that meet the state’s behavioral health needs, Dr. Doyle said.
“Everyone knows there are workforce shortages,” she said. “If you don’t know the number, you don’t know the scope and you don’t know the trend, it makes it very difficult for you to figure out where you can have the highest impact as far as intervention goes.”
The report, which can be viewed here, helps provide those important details in order to better target workforce solutions, Dr. Tibbits said.
Moving forward, she said, the report will be updated and enhanced to help stakeholders continually improve and adapt their workforce development strategies.
As established by the legislative statute that created BHECN in 2009, the organization is charged with compiling and reporting data on Nebraska’s behavioral health workforce.
New to this year’s report are data snapshots that examine the workforce from multiple perspectives, including:
- Statewide distribution of the workforce.
- Distribution across the state’s six behavioral health regions.
- Workforce composition by provider type.
As a stakeholder in the state’s behavioral health workforce discussion, Behmer Popp lauded BHECN for its work on compiling the data and crafting the report.
“Data is one of those things I don’t think people realize how important it is unless you don’t have it,” she said. “It’s not easy to get accurate information.”