Sonoma County to make mobile mental health response teams available 24 hours a day
Sonoma County is expanding its mobile mental health crisis response teams to be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and will create a dedicated hotline and dispatch center by the end of the year.
The expansion is part of a state-mandated change to Medi-Cal, which will require 24/7 crisis response teams as a benefit starting in 2024.
The county's Department of Health Services staff is working to expand an existing mobile service team that the county has had since 2012 and merge it with three other teams run by different cities. The programs will remain separate but will all field calls from the same hotline number.
The hotline number is 1-800-746-8181. It currently operates 24 hours a day as a mental health hotline, but mobile crisis teams are only available in unincorporated areas of the county from noon to 10 p.m., Monday through Friday and they are not dispatched directly from those operators.
Outside of those hours, mental health crisis calls are handled by law enforcement. One of the main goals of the Medi-Cal program is to make trained medical professionals available to address mental health crises. Mental health crisis calls that are also an emergency will be responded to by both law enforcement and the mobile service team.
Creating a unified number for people to call countywide was also a major goal of the state's program. The crisis team in Santa Rosa, for example, is currently dispatched through the 911 dispatch center.
"Up until now, the mobile support teams are accessed by the public through 911. And many times the public is not very excited, a lot of our clients at least, are not too excited to be calling the police when they're having a crisis" Jan Cobaleda-Kegler, director of the Sonoma County Behavioral Health Division, told the county's Board of Supervisors at its meeting Tuesday.
The mobile support teams must include a licensed medical professional known as a Licensed Practitioner of the Healing Arts, or LPHA, and another care professional who does not need to be licensed.
Wendy Tappon, the mobile support team health program manager, said the county was looking to use telehealth to enable multiple teams to operate with just the non-LPHA present, which are easier to recruit, and include positions like alcohol counselors and senior support specialists.
"It's been a shortage across the state to get behavioral health clinicians, so, that's always been the hardest part for the mobile support teams," Tappon said.
Expanding the program will require hiring 18.5 new positions and purchasing five new vehicles at a cost of $3.3 million this fiscal year and about $4.1 million in each of the next two fiscal years, paid for mostly with a combination of Medi-Cal reimbursement and funding from Measure O, the county's quarter-cent sales tax implemented by voters in 2020 for 10 years.
"This is a big deal," said Supervisor Susan Gorin.
The cost of the program could change as cities make their own assessments of expanding their programs.