Meeting Minutes - Thursday, October 20, 2022 - 2:30 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. via WebEx
- Dr. Lorrie Jones opened the meeting at 2:30 p.m.
- Attendees:
- Blanca Campos, Brent Reynolds, Drew Hansen, Shelly Dallas, Richard Manthy, Ashley Thoele, Lee Reinert (surrogate for David Albert) Kathleen McNamara, Jennifer Wooldridge, Lia Daniels, Eddie Markel, Stephanie Frank
Note: Only committee members are allowed to exchange information and openly communicate during this meeting process. There will be period allowed for Public Comments after the conclusion of the formal meeting.
- Approval of the minutes from October 6, 2022, was called. Motion was made to approve the minutes as written. Motion was seconded. The minutes were approved as written.
- Review of Final Charter - call for approval of the Charter
- Question (Blanca Campos) - Is there a national standard for response time - would this be discussed in regulation?
- Answer (Lorrie Jones) - There can a review of national standards for response time for MCRT
- Motion was made to approve the Charter. Motion was seconded. The Charter was approved as written.
- Discussion on the adding of Region co-chairs to the SAC Subcommittees - It was presented that Region co-chairs participation in these subcommittees would be beneficial to enrich the discussion of these SAC subcommittees. The RAC chairs would not be voting members, but rather viewed as expert consultants to the SAC subcommittees.
Note: A reminder was made that the Protocol and Standards subcommittee membership must take the OMA training.
- Almost all of the 11 EMS Region committee members' lists have been reconciled. 7 EMS Regions have had appointment letters released. Work is being done to get the remaining EMS Regions' committee lists approved.
- The Crisis Hub will be working to develop prototypes on what the RAC meetings should look like, how they should be conducted, provide PowerPoint materials, speakers bureau, etc. The goal is for the SAC subcommittees to be ahead of the work of the RAC.
Question (Blanca): Will the State push to the extend the CESSA January due date?
Answer (Lorrie): DMH is currently working with legislative affairs to amend current language in CESSA
Comment (Brent): The language in CESSA says that CESSA will only go into effect with the State is ready to implement.
- What were the take-aways from the Priority Dispatch discussion?
- Good opportunity to see the process and decision-making steps
- Would like to look at all three vendors to see how they work and when they switch calls to 988
- Thought it was helpful to better understand the processes and to learn how incidents are coded and how codes are assigned risk levels; codes lead to risk strata and how strata will determine dispatch decisions.
Note: Look at DuPage County, which has been on the forefront of curve - they use the same codes and decision stratification throughout the entire County's system.
Question (Alice Carey): What is an acceptable emergency response time? Concern that if an incident is left untreated it may escalate into a major emergency.
Question (Blanca Campos): Is telehealth an opportunity to leverage resources?
Answer: 988 is consider a telehealth. They address low risk calls sent to them from 911. It is just as important that 988 have the latitude to kick calls back to 911.
Question: Is there any thought on how 590 will communicate back to law enforcement?
Answer: In some communities these relationships already exist and that networking between behavioral health and law enforcement has extended for a period of time. These can be considered as 'co-responder models' if it works for the respective Region.
Comment: (Shelley Dallas) - with PSAPs there is a standard of care response time based on the situation. PSAPS have sixty seconds to make a dispatch decision. Dispatch can mean, dispatch to 988.
Comment: (Blanca Campos) - I have met with Chicago providers who expressed that they have had to leave their cars unattended to address a crisis call and their vehicles have been ticketed or towed. There needs to be something to identify these vehicles as Emergency Responders.
Response: Some jurisdictions have their own identified vehicles, i.e., Cahoots model. Maybe there can be work done with the Secretary of State to provide tags for vehicles on emergency status.
Anyone interested in looking at what work is being done in other states and other jurisdictions, let Lorrie Jones know. Does anyone have any ideas where there may be other efforts occurring?
Lia, Kathleen, and Blanca all expressed interest.
- Dr. Eddie Markel - Crisis Assistance Response & Engagement (CARES Pilot):
There are three CARES Teams in Chicago, 6th District, 19th District and the 7th/8th Districts. The city of Chicago's PSAPS do not use Priority Dispatch for their decision tree, but rather its own home-grown system, with questions developed in the early 2000s. While it is the interest of the CPD to expand CARES, it faces the same work force barriers as the larger mental health system of care - it is hard to staff for an expansion. A question was asked if Program 590 (MCRT) could be integrated into the CARES model. This would be a great pilot.
A discussion transpired about reporting under CARES and prioritizing. There is a data dashboard to capture outcomes results. It is very infrequent that there have been multiple requests for intervention occurring at the same time.
Question: During off hours, how does CARES dispatch work?
Answer: Outside of assigned business hours of operations, CARES is not available. Also, there have been no safety concerns with the implementation of this pilot.
Question - Should Risk Stratification be statewide? Drew agrees that is should be universal. It would be welcoming to take that decision off the plate for the Region planning. An Identified HIGH RISK would automatically be handled by law enforcement and there would be no deviation across Regions.
- Homework discussion
- What will Regions need from SAC Standards and Protocols committee
- What should be elements of a Toolkit for the Regions?
- What kind of guidance should be proposed for the Regions?
- Next meeting - Standards and Protocols will have a presentation from another State
Note: The committee must change the date from November 3rd. There was an objection to November 10th. Lorrie will send out a Doodle Poll for a day during the 1st week in November.
Subsequent meeting dates are:
November 17th
December 1st
December 15th
December 30th - canceled
- Public Comment - there were no Public Comments
Motion to adjourn the meeting. Motion seconded. Meeting adjourned at 3:58 p.m.
