What is it about?
Different factors influence access to psychiatric care, including the number of practicing psychiatrists, where a patient lives, and their insurance type (or whether they have insurance at all). Additionally, in the child population, certain documents may be needed to ensure residence in a certain area, parental consent for treatment, etc. This article investigates how a child’s insurance type and where they seek care from (a community center versus academic center) affect wait times and documentation requirements for initiation of outpatient psychiatric treatment.
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Why is it important?
These findings show that wait times for child psychiatric care remain long across the board between types of health centers and insurance types, but that patients on Medicaid may have longer wait times than self-pay patients at community health centers and Blue Cross Blue Shield patients at academic health centers. This raises questions about why this may be and what can be done to make care accessible to children regardless of insurance status (and by proxy, socioeconomic background) and where they live/can access care.
Perspectives
During medical school, the question of how long patients had to wait to be seen by a psychiatrist and how documentation requirements could be a barrier for our patients who are unsheltered, adopted/in the foster care system, or undocumented weighed on my mind. I had difficulty finding answers to these questions, sparking this research and eventual piece. It was so rewarding and meaningful to write this paper with my co-authors and I hope this article helps answer such questions for others.
Meghan Mallya
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Wait Time and Documentation Required for Child Psychiatric Care Across Payer and Facility Types, Psychiatric Services, July 2026, American Psychiatric Association,
DOI: 10.1176/appi.ps.20250181.
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