ROCHESTER — Olmsted County officials hope to restructure how mobile mental health crisis responses are handled in the county next year, regardless of whether the initial call for help was 911 or the national suicide prevention hotline, 988.
Earlier this week, the Health, Housing and Human Services Board heard from James Johnson, administrator of Olmsted County’s Health, Housing and Human Services Department, who asked for the board’s input on the plan.
Minnesota law requires counties and tribal organizations to provide mobile mental health crisis intervention services 24/7. Zumbro Valley Health Center provides these services through a contract with the county.
Currently, when Olmsted County residents contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, their phone call, text or online chat will likely be answered by a crisis counselor from Itasca County First Call for Help in Grand Rapids, and if a mobile crisis responder is needed, Zumbro Valley provides that service.
First Call for Help received 564,988 calls from Olmsted County in 2023, with 94 of those calls being forwarded to Zumbro Valley mobile crisis response staff. Last year, mobile crisis response staff also responded to 590 dispatches from people who called the Southeast Regional Crisis Center’s 1-844-274-7472 helpline.
But Johnson said that when a call for help comes in through 911 about a mental or behavioral health crisis that requires an in-person response, the county’s community outreach teams will respond. The teams are made up of social workers and peer support specialists who respond to the scene alongside police officers. Half of the team specializes in drug and alcohol response, and the other half specializes in mental and behavioral health.
Community outreach teams received 2,024 calls for behavioral health joint responses in 2023, according to data presented at the commission meeting.
Sydney Frye, program manager for the Community Outreach Team, said the county’s mental health co-responders and Zumbro Valley’s mobile crisis responders respond to similar situations. The difference is whether the initial call comes from 911 or 988.
“These services have been running in parallel with each other,” Frye said.
The goal is to streamline the local mental health crisis response system by having Olmsted County teams respond to calls for service through 988 and 911.
“By 2025, we want to have a unified community response where any member of the community can pick up any phone and dial 911, 988,” said Alex Bunger, deputy commissioner of Dodge & Olmsted Community Corrections. “When a local response is warranted and necessary, it will all be centralized in our proposed mobile crisis response team.”
The grant money from the Minnesota Department of Human Resources will help restructure the service.
County Health and Human Services staff presented three options to the board and recommended the county move forward with Option B, a tax-neutral mobile crisis and stabilization option, which would add five new staff members: one mental health professional on the community response team, two crisis social workers and two social workers on the stabilization team.
“Crisis stabilization services are a very important component of a full mobile crisis continuation service that provides ongoing support for up to 45 days,” Bangor said. “It might be referrals to treatment programs, it might be some case management, but the real goal … is to get that person back to functioning as they were before they had the crisis.”
In option B, 24/7 coverage is not planned, but an on-call schedule is used to accommodate nights, weekends, and holiday service.
Option A, the first presented, would only add three people to the team and would not include stabilization services. Option C would hire seven new people so that mobile crisis services could be staffed around the clock. However, this plan requires levy funding.
Commissioners Sheila Kiskaden, Laurel Podulke Smith and David Senjem gave staff the go-ahead to implement Option B.
“This meets our statutory obligation to invest every dollar we earn, creates a model to improve on what we have today and gets us closer to our future vision of a 24/7 staffed community operation without impacting taxation,” Mr Johnson said.
