Unfortunately, many vulnerable people fall through the cracks in traditional emergency services. A community response team works to cover these cracks, fill the gaps, and ensure no community residents are left behind. Here’s how they do it.
Community response teams cover a growing chasm in care by building teams that reach out to residents in mental health crises, difficult social situations, substance abuse, and children who need extra support in the home. Essentially, the community response team is there to prevent the vulnerable from slipping into a spiral they can’t escape.
Below, we’ll discuss community response programs, how they work, and the people they help.
How Community Response Programs Work
For those of you who are completely new to the idea of community response programs, this section will give you a broad overview of what they can do and how they help residents. In the later sections, we’ll break everything down so you can understand the why behind them.
Here are a few important aspects of Community Response Programs:
- Community Response Programs are All Different (Based on the Community’s Needs)
- Community Response Programs Fall Under the Mobile Integrated Health Umbrella
- Community Response Programs Respond to Mental Health Patients
- Community Response Programs Respond to Those Struggling with Substance Abuse
- Community Response Programs Reduce PD Involvement and Bring More Experts to the Scene
- Community Response Programs Look Out for At-Risk Children
Now, we’ll look at each of these points in detail.
Community Response Programs are All Different (Based on the Community’s Needs)
The first thing to note about community response programs is that they can all look a little different. This is by design. Each community is different, and it will require nuanced approaches to the problems it faces.
As you may have seen in the last section, some crisis response programs are tailored to different emergencies (mental health, substance abuse, etc.). They will not only respond to a myriad of emergencies but also have different professionals within the program.
In some crisis response programs, a team of rehab professionals, social workers, and people trained in mental health response will be assembled. The team’s composition will depend on the residents’ needs and the community’s resources.
While the types of professionals on a crisis response team can differ, all team members try to broaden their understanding of the community’s needs in hopes that they can provide ever-improving care.
Community Response Programs Fall Under the Mobile Integrated Health Umbrella
Community response teams and programs fall under a broader category known as mobile integrated healthcare. This category includes community paramedicine, crisis response teams, home health care, hospital diversion programs, and super-utilizer management teams.
The idea behind mobile integrated healthcare is simple: bringing together the entire community health team as a cohesive unit. With these teams, everyone speaks to each other—the hospital, the rehab center, the urgent care, the emergency medical services, the fire department, and the police department. No one is left in the dark.
Most of the time, mobile integrated health team members communicate on a unified platform, allowing everyone to be keyed into real-time data on how patient care is progressing. This method creates a powerful, ever-growing snowball that can break through even the most minor gaps in healthcare.
Community response teams take this same approach, ensuring that residents receive the most holistic care and avoiding the common “one size fits all” healthcare approach. While community response teams are incredibly diverse in their missions, in the next section, we will discuss some of the areas where these teams are making the biggest impact.
Community Response Programs Respond to Mental Health Patients
One of the most critical breakthroughs of community response teams is their response to people in mental health crises. Why? There are a couple of reasons.
First, mental health has been declining for many population groups around the country. We see increasing numbers of people with severe depression, unmanageable anxiety, and even suicide. The troubles the world faced during the global pandemic only made things worse, and we are still trying to climb out of that dark hole.
Second, many mental health patients have struggled to receive the kind of holistic care they need. Unfortunately, these patients often get into a loop of ER visits, quick fixes (that don’t last), repeat incidents, and back to the ER. The community response team seeks to put an end to this never-ending loop.
Third, the country has recently recognized that, while police departments do good work in many areas of the community, LE officers interacting with mental health patients can often have unintended consequences. We’ll talk more about this later; however, many communities opt for a co-responder level due to these issues.
The community response team often staffs mental health professionals trained to meet the needs of people in crisis directly. These teams also often have access to social workers who can help people take positive steps forward in their lives.
Community Response Programs Respond to Those Struggling with Substance Abuse
Unfortunately, mental health and substance abuse often walk hand in hand. For this reason, community response teams have worked to help those struggling with substance abuse. How? There are a few key initiatives.
First, there will be teams (often with a paramedic and a rehab professional) who will respond directly to the scene of an overdose or drug-related incident. The paramedic will ensure the patient is medically stable, and the rehab professional will describe the next steps if the patient wants to pursue recovery.
Second, there are teams known as PORT – Post Overdose Response Teams. These teams are part of the overall crisis response initiative. The PORT will respond to the person several days after the incident to provide support and offer assistance.
Altogether, community response programs want to reduce the hopelessness that many struggling with substance abuse feel and give their residents a path to real recovery.
Community Response Programs Reduce PD Involvement and Bring More Experts to the Scene
We discussed in a previous section that crisis response teams work to reduce PD involvement in mental health and substance abuse cases. In this section, we’ll dive into some more reasons why this is important.
First, the police have a job to keep communities safe. Unfortunately, many police forces around the country struggle with staffing and responding to real crimes. As a result, many police departments find they are stretched to a breaking point. There are many times when police officers are forced to respond to a mental health incident when they could be responding to a real crime.
Second, police officers on-scene can make mental health patients more nervous. The very nature of the police officer is a figure of authority. While this image is critical in scenes that require protection from violence, this image can be less than beneficial for patients already struggling with mental health issues.
Third, we should point out that police officers are not completely removed from the picture with a community response team. If there is any credible threat of violence, a police officer will be on the scene. Reducing the presence of police officers when they are not necessary does not mean removing them from a scene where their services may be needed.
If you’re curious, read how to create PD buy-in for your co-responder program.
Community Response Programs Look Out for At-Risk Children
Like many public services around the country, child protective services can sometimes struggle to meet all the needs in their community. Often, there are situations where child protective services are called, but they don’t have enough to go on to make a serious intervention in a case.
Community response programs can reach out to families and help protect children who live in at-risk homes before they fall into dangerous conditions. These teams often comprise social workers and clinical professionals who can help guide these children to a safer path.
Now that you know what community response programs are, let’s discuss the glue that holds them together.
The Bridge Needed to Cross the Gap Between Emergency Services and Residents
As you’ve seen, emergency services are unable to respond to and care for all the nuanced needs of the community. Ambulances and ERs are often trained to treat life threats, so when patients need something more nuanced, they’re out of luck.
That’s where community response teams come in. They assist patients who need extra help, such as people with mental health struggles, substance abuse, or at-risk children. Community response teams do great work; however, they can only cross the gap if they have the right bridge.
Julota is the bridge that allows community response teams to cross that gap in healthcare and provide the care residents deserve. Julota is a safe, all-in-one platform that allows for care coordination, careful patient management, and unrivaled data collection.
Feel free to contact Julota now with any questions. A representative would be happy to demonstrate the product and show you how their tools can improve your community response team.