The past year and a half have presented us with many opportunities to learn valuable lessons—one of them being that the police force and first responders are not a one-size-fits-all in terms of handling the wide spectrum of what might be considered an emergency.
This is why Missoula’s Mobile Support Team (or MST for short) was launched in Montana. The MST is a collaboration between the fire department and Partnership Health Center that offers support to police who contact MST when faced with a behavioral health call. When they receive a call from the police, a clinician and an EMT arrive on the scene to offer specialized behavioral health services. The main aim of the MST is to help people in crisis while avoiding sending them to jail or to the emergency room.
Since its debut as a pilot in November of last year, the team has received 499 calls that add up to 389 hours on scene. The result of their work is 128 emergency room diversions and 22 jail diversions. The success of the program has convinced Missoula to make the MST a permanent service starting this month.
The team works in two shifts that offer services from 10 am to 8 pm, seven days a week. A lot of the success that the MST experiences are due to the slower approach that an MST is able and trained to take.
According to John Petroff, a member of the Missoula Fire Department and the MST’s operations manager, first responders are taught to work as quickly as possible. They are “trained to have solutions fast, mitigate a problem, and move onto the next one,” he explains. Meanwhile, the MST’s calls, on average, last just over three-quarters of an hour.
Missoula’s Mobile Services Team is one of six mobile response units that are active in the state of Montana and is part of the increasing number of similar programs popping up all over the country like Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS, Spokane, Washington’s Mobile Community Assertive Treatment team, and Denver’s STAR program.
What sets the MST apart is how it’s expanded its behavioral and mental health workers to include follow-up services. “We provide follow-up case facilitation at the end,” says Terry Kendrick, the MST’s program manager. “If you’re in crisis and someone hands you a referral or tells you to go to the Salvation Army, you’re [probably] not in a place to take that information in. Or some of that is just hard for folks who are already feeling overwhelmed.” This is why the MST follows up with resources that will make it more likely for the people they treat to get long-term help if needed.
As of now, the pilot program has been dispatched alongside the police, however, Kendrick reveals that the new permanent version of the program is exploring what it could look like if the MST were dispatched on its own.
