New mobile crisis response team aims at reducing ER visits, increasing connections

The Saint John Integrated Mobile Crisis Response Team will defer emergency room visits for people struggling with mental health, according to Social Development Minister Dorothy Shephard.

The pilot program was announced on Friday and will pair specially trained members of the Saint John police force with mental health professionals. The pilot will last three years. 

"They offer to each other the expertise of diffusing situations and of being able to understand if a crisis is indeed a life-threatening crisis," Dorothy told Information Morning Saint John. 

Shepard said the response team will help people dealing with mental health problems build trust in the system. 

When they're not dealing with crisis situations, the team will follow-up with people from previous calls to check in on their situation. 

They will also check in on people in the community that have known mental health problems to prevent situations from escalating.

"They're proactively reaching those in the community who really need some mental health services but don't trust the system enough to reach out yet," Shephard said.

Outgoing police Chief Bruce Connell said the hope is that there will be less emergency room visits from people struggling with mental health, as well as a decrease in mentally ill individuals being placed behind bars.

"It's my experience that the emergency department isn't the proper place to try and deal with mental ill health," Connell said.

"To lock somebody up because it's the last resort, that's not treating people fairly." 

Shepard and Connell said putting two agencies together will result in better services for the community.

"We have a duty to care, but the reality is we weren't the best trained to do these calls. We needed a team approach," said Connell. 

In addition, a separate initiative will have two child protection social workers working out of the Saint John Police Force office. It's based on a pilot program running at Milltown Elementary School in St. Stephen that has a social worker working inside the school.  

Shephard said there hasn't been a progress report released on that program, but she hears it's going well. 

"I'm hearing from other principals that they're jealous they don't have this resource in their school," she said. "I'm hearing we're preventing problems from escalating."

She said the hope is the same for social workers at the Saint John Police Force. 

"So that consultation can happen in real time and conversations can happen so both professions develop relationships that are really meaningful and when those relationships happen you work better together."