For context: San Diego County has 16 mobile crisis teams responding to calls involving acute mental health crises. Each team includes a mental health clinician and two other healthcare experts. The two authors of this opinion piece are the director of the city’s Health and Human Services Agency and the director of the agency’s Behavioral Health Services Division. They help oversee the county’s mobile crisis response program.
“From their launch through late July, the Mobile Crisis Response Teams have responded to more than 2,245 referrals. Of those, 40 percent have resulted in the individual in crisis being able to remain in the community without the need for more acute care or law enforcement involvement. More than 515 individuals have been connected to behavioral health resources and services for the first time …. Typically, when someone is experiencing a crisis of any kind, it can be second nature to call 911. Yet we know not every call to 911 requires a law enforcement response. Providing this new crisis response option has been a win-win for clients and emergency personnel, not only freeing up law enforcement, but emergency medical providers who might have otherwise been dispatched to nonviolent, nonmedical emergencies.”
Related: “5 patients cost $4 million in ambulance rides.” For context: Cities waste millions of dollars cycling people with acute mental health needs in and out of emergency rooms, creating a strain on hospital resources and providing suboptimal care to people in desperate need of mental health services. Mobile crisis response teams can help.
“Five individuals alone over the past five years had at least 1,781 ambulance transports, possibly up to 2,000, which costs $4 million … The five struggled with alcohol use disorder, possibly self-medicating due to an undiagnosed mental illness …. The city’s only psych emergency department capped its capacity at 19 beds at the start of the pandemic and still diverts all patients to its emergency room for COVID testing. Although the department is licensed for 18 patients, census routinely rose into the mid-20s before the pandemic. A third of patients are discharged directly from the emergency department, while two-thirds come back … To reduce the burden, the city has turned to a slew of alternative programs, including a psychiatric urgent care clinic, the Street Crisis Response Team and a drug sobering center.”
Related: In Connecticut, where a variation on the street team has existed for years, researchers from the Child Health & Development Institute found that “mobile crisis response is associated with a 25% reduction in emergency department visits.”