Standard of Practice for Advanced Practice Providers in a Psychiatric Care Setting at a Single Institution

Background Patients’ access to psychiatric care is partially limited by the number of psychiatric providers. To address this gap in care, there has been an increase in advanced practice providers (APPs) providing psychiatric care. Method We discuss our institution’s experience with the integration of APPs into our outpatient psychiatry clinic. We describe our motivations, the problems we faced, and the changes we made to address them. In addition, we describe the current practice model of APPs in our practice, and the impact of having APPs in our practice. Results Our institution has added 17 APPs to our pool of clinicians. We increased the number of patients we see annually from 3163 unique patients in 2015 to 11667 unique patients in 2023. In 2023, APPs saw 6362 of these unique patients. In addition, the average wait time for a new appointment dropped from over 12 weeks in 2015 to 2 weeks in 2023. Conclusion APPs have been valuable in addressing the growing demand for psychiatric services at our institution. Our described current model can serve as a reference for the integration of APPs into an outpatient psychiatric clinic.