By Kaitlin Durbin
cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio – It’s first week open, Cuyahoga County’s new 24-hour crisis center saw 71 patients.
The first of them arrived at 8:15 a.m. last Monday morning, shortly after the Glick Recovery Campus officially opened, Eric Morse, president and CEO of The Centers, which runs the facility, told cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer.
“That speaks to the need,” he said.
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The majority of patients were walk-ins, taking advantage of the self-serve and “no wrong door” entry that the new crisis center promised. Twenty-five percent, or 18, people were brought in by Cleveland police officers, Morse said. Three were brought in by ambulance services.
That’s 30% of patients being brought in for evaluations by law enforcement, Morse noted. It’s really only one agency so far, he said, but the numbers show promise for a model that truly can divert individuals experiencing mental health or substance abuse disorders out of the criminal justice system and into care.
That was a pitfall of the county’s last crisis center, the Diversion Center, which will officially close on Oct. 14 . It was initially envisioned to offer low-level offenders a choice of getting appropriate care to avoid reoffending or be taken to jail, but it never lived up to expectations, because police didn’t widely use it and patients had to call ahead and get permission to enter.
For now, Morse said they’ve mostly been marketing the new crisis center to Cleveland police while they settle into the new space. They’ve only opened 20 of the total 40 planned crisis chairs and had planned to ramp up capacity slowly over the next six to eight months.
But he believes word will spread fast and departments in the inner-ring suburbs will especially find it useful, knowing they can drop people off and return to the streets in minutes rather than waiting half an hour or more for them to be admitted to a hospital. If that happens, Morse said they may open more of the crisis chairs sooner than planned.
They set a goal of seeing 300 patients this month at the East 22nd Street facility. They saw nearly a quarter of that in the first week.
“It went really well,” Morse said. “We’re probably ahead.”
Most of the patients were seen quickly – well within the promised 23-hour assessment window – and sent home with a care plan and referrals to additional services, he said. Many were also provided prescriptions, though he didn’t yet have the number of prescriptions filled at the on-site pharmacy.
After the assessment, he said some of the patients were transferred to in-patient services for mental health treatment and a couple went to other detox units in the community for substance abuse treatment, since the withdrawal-management wing is not yet set up at the Glick campus. He could not immediately provide exact numbers.
Morse said The Centers is still on track to open its own 12 withdrawal management beds in January. And then the campus is hoped to be a one-stop shop for behavioral health needs, offering immediate crisis care, substance abuse treatment, psychiatric stabilization, outpatient services, primary care, a pharmacy, counseling, peer support and case management under one roof.
The center is expected to serve roughly 12,000 people a year.
Funding, though, remains shaky. The Centers is counting on $12 million in Cuyahoga County’s opioid settlement dollars to be able to sustain the crisis center and expand services in January, but County Council has been hesitant to approve it. Council is expected to discuss the funding again next week.
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