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The Mental Health Drug and Alcohol Services Board of Logan and Champaign Counties recently received a $559,250 grant to implement a co-responder crisis response team that covers Logan and Champaign counties.

The team will provide acute mental health crisis de-escalation and stabilization to local residents within their own homes and in other sites outside a traditional clinical setting.

The co-responder team will also evaluate the need for care coordination for individuals who received a Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) response in the last 6 months and are not already connected to care. This aspect of the program will address underlying personal and social vulnerabilities that may mitigate the likelihood of future crisis events.

The co-responder team will include 6 peer supporters or case managers and 2 licensed clinicians that collaborate closely with the 911 dispatch centers and treatment providers in each county.

The goals of this project are to reduce law enforcement time on the scene, reducing the duration of the crisis event, reduce the potential use of force with the patient, increase immediate access to behavioral health resources, reducing arrests, and reducing emergency department use.

These teams are associated with improvements in patient experience during and after the crisis, improvements in communication and collaboration between the policing and behavioral health systems, a reduction in the time it takes to successfully resolve the crisis, and improved rates of patient connections to appropriate ongoing care.

The local grant is part of a statewide effort.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine announced last month the award of $90 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds aimed at strengthening mental health and addiction crisis services statewide. A total of 37 regional projects will receive funding through the Ohio Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services (MHAS).

“Across Ohio, people of all ages and their families are seeking care in record numbers for substance use and mental health concerns,” said DeWine. “I am proud of the work we are doing in Ohio to make services more visible, accessible and effective for all Ohioans faced with mental health and substance use crises. By expanding access to a full array of crisis services, more Ohioans of all ages will receive the care they need in their local community so that they can recover and reach their full potential.”

OhioMHAS will oversee coordination of the grants in collaboration with county Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health (ADAMH) Boards. As a part of the planning process, Boards were required to work with community partners (service providers, law enforcement, hospitals) to identify local needs and gaps in their regional crisis systems and to develop collaborative projects to add capacity statewide. The resulting awards will fund a mix of capital improvement projects (26 projects, $74.5M) and infrastructure projects (11 projects, $15.5M), closing locally identified gaps in care such as short-term residential beds, behavioral health urgent care, mobile crisis response teams, and facility/IT improvements. (See attached list of funded projects).

Specifically, the funding will:

-Add more than 225 new residential beds for Ohioans in crisis

-Establish 5 Behavioral Health Urgent Care clinics

-Support 2 new Crisis Intervention and Observation units

-Launch 6 new mobile crisis services teams

-Assist with 4 technology upgrade projects

-Support 2 crisis consultancy projects

“Because of these investments, more Ohioans and their families will have a better response to their behavioral health crisis needs than ever before,” said Ohio MHAS Director Lori Criss. “With these projects, Ohio is taking a leap forward to reverse decades of neglect for Ohio’s behavioral health crisis care system, ultimately creating a more hopeful future for people experiencing a behavioral health crisis.”

Info from MHDAS