Three Things To Read This Week
ICYMI: Safer Cities recently published a special edition, which includes our attempt at mapping the modern public safety infrastructure. We’ve appreciated the terrific feedback so far, and we’d appreciate hearing more! Email us at: matt@safercitiesresearch.com
1. Four New Crisis Stabilization Centers
Crisis Stabilization Centers provide “substance use disorder and behavioral health
support services” for people experiencing acute mental illness or intoxication. First responders, including police departments and mobile crisis response units, can take people in crisis to these facilities—which are designed to get people the help that they need quickly—instead of taking them to jail or the emergency room.
Here are four new crisis stabilization centers launching around the country:
Cleveland, Ohio. For Cleveland’s local NBC affiliate, WKYC3, Emma Henderson, reports on a new behavioral health center that “will utilize a living room model intake area to feel less clinical and will have peer supporters for those coming in. The facility will also have a 23-hour psychiatric observation unit, plus a 16-room crisis stabilization unit for people who are in need of additional care, including medications.” As Henderson writes, “When looking at how to tackle the mental health crisis sweeping the nation, including Cleveland, there is no single solution. However, a nearly $7 million center designed for crisis care is a good start.” Moreover, “the goal is to replicate this setup, if successful, across Northeast Ohio, the state and beyond.”
Atlanta, Georgia. For WABE, Atlanta’s public radio station, Jess Mador reports on construction beginning on the Fulton Behavioral Health Crisis Center, the county’s “first publicly funded Behavioral Health Crisis Center … [which will be] open 24 hours a day, offering a variety of services and a special drop-in area for adults in crisis… [to] help alleviate chronic overcrowding in the state’s emergency rooms and the county jail [as] both have seen an uptick in Georgians struggling with mental health or substance-use issues.” Kevin Tanner, Commissioner of the state Department of Behavioral Health, told the news station that the facility is a “setting with no stigma, just a very calming environment” and when a patient comes in, Tanner said, they can immediately “be observed by a professional for a short period of time, up to 23 hours.” As Mador reports, the Fulton center is the first to break ground, but two other similar facilities are in development and each facility will be accepting patients through the state’s 988 crisis hotline network.
Anchorage, Alaska. Annie Berman writes for Anchorage Daily News about the construction of “a new $11 million [crisis stabilization] facility that will offer walk-in care to Alaskans experiencing behavioral health and substance disorder-related emergencies.” The new center “will include a 12-bed residential unit that's designed for adult patients who need a longer stay, anywhere from four to seven days… [as well as] “a crisis stabilization space… where patients will receive initial care, assessment and triage.” Lauren Anderson, the facility’s clinical manager, told the newspaper that this design “allows a really rapid response time” [which] “can look like getting quick access to a therapist or psychiatrist… which is currently hard to get given long waitlists and few providers.”
Frederick County, Maryland. For Maryland Matters, Danielle Brown reports on “mental health advocates and elected officials celebrating the soft-opening of a new 24-hour crisis center, which officials called the first of its kind in Maryland, aiming to provide people with immediate mental health services in their greatest times of need.” The Center will provide those in crisis with “readily available mental health services at no cost to them with no appointment needed. The CEO of the Mental Health Association of Frederick County told Maryland Matters that a “crisis” can encompass a wide-variety of scenarios—“if it’s a youth and they’re experiencing anxiety …. it can be relationship, mental health or substance use related, it could be a family matter. Some people who have reached out have just gotten a life-altering medical diagnosis. So we don’t define the crisis — the person does.”
2. “Curbing Crime From The Victim’s Hospital Bed”
As part of a multi-edition effort (e.g. here, here and here) to highlight compelling, fair, and informative local television news reporting, today we feature a segment on hospital based violence intervention programs reported on by Brianna Hollis at KXAN, the local NBC Affiliate in Austin, Texas. From the segment:
“Travis County is working on a program that could reduce retaliation as well as re-victimization. This initiative is called hospital-based violence intervention … Sometimes victims need help navigating the criminal justice system or even accessing mental health resources and oftentimes unfortunately victims either end up back in the hospital because of future attacks or even in jail for retaliatory attacks.
According to other cities that have implemented this program the most common needs for patients are mental health resources, legal assistance, employment, housing, and education. ‘Ultimately they could also then refer those victims to the trauma Recovery Center,’ said Terra Tucker with Alliance for Safety and Justice. Here in Travis County, Commissioners voted to set up the Trauma Recovery Center which will help provide these resources long term. The hospital-based intervention would act as a bridge to this facility. ‘Whatever it is that they need to help them heal, so that one-stop shop.’
The hospital-based intervention program in Travis County is still in its very early planning stages in Harris County. Forty-four patients have participated in the program since it launched in November … A similar method is proving to be successful out of Houston right now [and] several [other] major cities across the country use this program including Chicago, Philadelphia, and San Francisco—and in Chicago people who received the services were less likely to get re-victimized. According to a review of that model, 20 percent of patients who didn’t join the program went back to the hospital within six months, while only eight percent of victims who did join the program went back to the hospital.”
3. “How Mobile Teams On Skid Row Use Oxygen To Prevent Overdoses And Save Lives.”
“Every day, the nonprofit Homeless Health Care Los Angeles sends out trained teams on carts to intervene and stop overdoses in and around Skid Row,” Emily Alpert Reyes reports for the Los Angeles Times. “They are armed not only with naloxone — a medicine commonly known as Narcan that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose — but also cylinders of lifesaving oxygen.”
Shoshanna Scholar, a division director within the L.A. County Department of Health Services, told Alpert Reyes that the added use of oxygen, which “helps [to] stabilize people faster, address a range of drug threats and spare the brain from worse damage,” puts Los Angeles on “‘the cutting edge of overdose response.’”
Alpert Reyes’ reporting also beautifully captures what this overdose response looks like in practice:
“Behind the steering wheel of the black [oxygen] cart, Simon Angel Melendrez scanned the streets of Skid Row, searching for anyone struggling to breathe. When he saw a man slumped forward in his wheelchair on a downtown sidewalk, Melendrez pulled the cart over and jumped out.
The man barely reacted when Melendrez shook his shoulder. Blood dripped from a wound on his brow … He had overdosed earlier in the day, according to another man on the street ... ‘I’m going to check his oxygen right now,’ [Melendrez] called to his co-worker Aurora Morales, grabbing a pulse oximeter to slip onto his finger. Morales squeezed the man’s shoulder and urged him to take deep breaths. His oxygen levels were bobbing up and down, the device attached to his finger showed.
Melendrez hustled back to the cart and hoisted an oxygen cylinder onto the sidewalk. ‘Just take a deep breath,’ Melendrez told him, squeezing his shoulder… Minutes later, the pulse oximeter was showing more reassuring numbers. [The team] left the man with a plastic bag with gauze, alcohol wipes and other supplies for his wound and phoned the other Homeless Health Care team circling Skid Row, asking them to keep the man in the wheelchair on their radar.”
