Dane County Expands Commitment to Mental Health Services with New Community Resource Center

As the final weeks of 2019 inched closer, I joined community leaders and mental health advocates to sign the 2020 Dane County budget. Of the many investments Dane County will make in 2020, this year we are prioritizing the need to expand access to mental and behavioral health resources for our residents. Our top job at the start of this decade is focusing on ways we can help kids, seniors, and everyone in between struggling with mental health and addiction. Too many families are needlessly suffering, too many lives are being cut short.

Shortly before the holidays we announced our intention to develop the new Dane County Mental Health Resource Center. In what is truly a first-of-its-kind collaboration, Dane County government, private health providers and insurers, and community non-profit service providers are teaming together to help residents struggling with mental health and addiction challenges get connected to supportive resources and treatment. Everyone who needs to be a part of improving care and service delivery is at the table, working together to make this center a national model.

Trying to navigate the maze of service options within the mental and behavioral health care field based on the type of insurance someone has and where their plan allows them to be treated can become overwhelming and ultimately deter them from seeking care.

“By opening this one-stop resource center and teaming with health care providers, we hope to make it easier for Dane County residents to navigate the health care system and advocate for themselves and their loved ones.”

This new center will cost Dane County over $900,000 per year to operate. We added the new dollars to the county budget needed to get operations up and going by this summer. The center will operate from 12:00PM to 4:00AM seven days a week with professional resource staff on hand to help connect individuals with available care and treatment, regardless of the health care system they are in. The call center will be rooted in integrated relationships with all providers and systems in the county, creating a mutually beneficial resource and referral exchange.

To complement this effort, the Dane County Department of Human Services has convened a Universal Access Work Group comprised of private and public health care providers. The group has started to meet regularly and is focused on the most effective means for private and public partners to collaborate. This workgroup will strive for tangible products detailing processes and procedures, data sharing, and other elements necessary to create a roadmap to achieve better access and care delivery across systems.

The creation of Dane County’s Mental Health Resource Center wouldn’t have been possible without the CJ Tubbs Fund for Hope, Healing, and Recovery. This brand new $1.5 million county fund is launching this year to honor the memory of Dane County Emergency Management Director Charles Tubbs’ son, who passed away from an accidental overdose in the summer of 2019, and the many other lives cut short by similar tragedies. Sadly, his story has become all too familiar in our community. Figures obtained last fall show 714 people in our community have died from overdose or suicide since 2016— more than five times the number killed in traffic crashes in that time.

Addiction and mental illness are too often interconnected, that’s why it’s important we address both aggressively with proven formulas. As the heroin epidemic evolves into new and different dangers, with $80,000 in new county dollars we have the opportunity to do more work with community recovery coaches—individuals who reach out to those struggling with addiction. These coaches work in emergency rooms and the jail, offering paths to recovery. The program works. None of the individuals paired with a recovery coach at a hospital has returned to the E.R. with an addiction emergency. 81% of jail inmates who work with a coach succeed at treatment. This year we are expanding the coaches into deferred prosecution programs and to organizations like the Outreach LGBT Community Center, Centro Hispano, and the Urban League.

“Thanks to NAMI Dane County, we are getting more of our frontline public safety and health workers trained at recognizing mental health emergencies and improving their response to them.”

We are extending the county’s existing contract with NAMI Dane County to provide countywide crisis intervention training for police officers, emergency medics, social workers, and others who often first come into contact with individuals presenting in crisis and in need of referral to care. This training will help defuse situations and provide an entry point to necessary mental and behavioral health care.

Childhood mental health, trauma, and poverty are all barriers to the future success of young people in the community, and our neighborhood and community centers often see these effects firsthand. They are an invaluable resource for our younger residents— that’s why I’m so excited to commit $600,000 in new dollars to bolster mental health services at community centers across Dane County this year, where we have a chance to make a real difference!

All these new and expanded efforts build upon the progress we’ve already made together. Our Building Bridges School Based Mental Health Teams started as a small program in a couple of Dane County schools a few years ago. Today it’s an over $1 million a year effort that works directly with young people, their parents, and teachers in nearly five dozen Dane County schools. Similar to our community centers initiative, it focuses on meeting youth where they are at to provide mental health resources to young people and families with school-aged children.

We are also doing more on the other end of the age spectrum—improving mental health services for older individuals. $200,000 helps the county hire two full-time mental health professionals to assist non-Medicaid eligible adult seniors. Staff members will work with Senior Focal Point case managers to help keep seniors who experience chronic mental illness living independently. We are hopeful that direct intervention like this will help with food security and other living considerations that can otherwise be affected by the toll severe mental illness can take on daily functioning.

We’re doing a lot, together. Total county funding for mental health services has more than doubled over the past decade, now totaling $65.6 per year. All of this work allows for some hope—the most critical piece for any family to maintain in the midst of the struggles with mental health or addiction. I’m grateful for the opportunity to work with organizations like NAMI Dane County to try and make life just a little easier for all who call our community home.