Community Emergency Services and Support Act (CESSA) Region 11 Advisory Committee
Meeting Minutes-11/18/2024- 1:00 PM
Meeting Minutes - Approved by Members 01/27/25
Attendees Present: Eugene Humphrey, Dr. Eddie Markul, Tiffany Patton-Burnside Matthew Fishback, Sandra Heidt, Candace Coleman (in place Jessica Gimeno), Kenji Grandberry, Greg Lee, Jennifer McGowan-Tomke
Absentees: Cosette Ayele, Matthew Tokarz, Karah Kohler, Jeffrey Jamrok, Nestor Flores, Jenique Dean, Rhonda Anderson, Johnathan Zaentz
Agenda Items: Introduction Roll Call, CESSA Update, Discussion & Public Comment.
Call to Order/Introductions:
Meeting Logistics/Open Meetings Act:
- Meeting recorded in accordance with the Open Meetings Act site at the Office of the Illinois Attorney General
- Minutes to be provided to the Illinois Department of Human Services Division of Mental Health
- Meetings are recorded. You may choose to turn off your camera.
- Minutes will be posted at the Illinois Department of Human Services Division of Mental Health on the Open Meetings page.
- Minutes will be posted after they have been approved at the following RAC meeting.
- Please remain on mute during the meeting unless you want to have some discussion. If you would like to speak, please raise your hand to get the presenters attention.
- Only appointed members may contribute to the discussion at any point during the meeting. Members of the public will be able to speak during the "Public Comment" session of the meeting.
Meeting Discussion Highlights:
- Roll call and Approval of previous meeting minutes for September Meeting
- Minutes were approved for the September Meeting by members who were in attendance.
- Reference was made, no meeting took place in July and August, October, and December 2024.
State updates:
- Training for RAC and SAC Members
- There are seven trainings that are required of all Boards, Commissions, Task Force members. If you have already taken a training due to another affiliation, you do not have to repeat.
- For trainings a link should have been sent from Illinois.gov and if no email has been received please reach out to Heather who will provide information to Brenda to troubleshoot the problem
- There is no penalty for not completing the trainings, however your name will go on a list. It is encouraged to have trainings completed
- There is no need to print out any certificates, if successfully completed they will be present in your profile.
- Trainings are: Ethics training, harassment and discrimination prevention, security awareness, HIPAA, and privacy, diversity, equity and inclusion and LGBTTQIIA plus equity and inclusion.
- Vibrant (988) Geo-routing by County
- Vibrant, the national overseer for 988, has approved geo-routing by Counties. That works well to better connect what county a person is calling from, but it is more complicated in Cook County. There will now be two 988 LCC that will cover all of Cook County, C4 and NAMI of Greater Chicago. Before, these 988 only had specific zip codes in Chicago. Centerstone (the statewide 988) will be their backup. This has just gone into effect on Monday, so there is no data. The FCC will not allow 988 to have geo-location as 911. 988 is a crisis counseling line. Callers to 988 must be assured that they can remain anonymous, if that is their desire.
Initiative Discussion:
590 Crisis CARE System /Mobile Crisis Response Teams:
- One of the big challenges that we have as a system is trying to integrate both the city resources and the public private resources into a comprehensive system.
- The city might be quite some time until CARE can be a 24-hr. phenomenon.
- The CARE team, and the Chicago police and fire department are still present. They're not going to be removed from the whole milieu of behavioral health response. They'll still be very busy dealing with people responding to people with behavioral health needs.
- Also, CDPH with their mental health clinics, the CARE team is now also mental health. For the public private we have 988 that's now you know being run primarily through NAMI, at least 18 hours a day, but the mobile crisis teams that were funded through 590 and our emergency departments as well. Private behavioral health organizations such as Thresholds, Trilogy, etc. are also present.
- Our current state is that there's still minimal interconnectivity between 911 and 988.
- That's really not that effective, our 911 dispatchers at the OEMC cannot dispatch a 590 team and at 988 they can transfer calls to get to 911.
- The integration of the behavioral health telecommunicators at OEMC next year, is gonna be a great start, and as one of the goals of CEESA is that we want to have 911 to 988 transfers.
- The goal is to be able to dispatch the 590 providers directly or to go through 988.
- The goal is to some point in the future have centralized dispatch. 911 would send that call to centralized dispatch.
- The pilot for 911 if there's a person that meets the low-level risk level interim risk level one, that call can be 1st addressed by 988.
- If 988 cannot resolve that person needs a community response, then 988 would send that to mobile crisis response teams.
- The thought process behind that is that our 911 call takers, dispatchers won't have the same time available to them or training that the experts at 988 have to really do a deep dive into a situation and perhaps provide some de-escalation to the person as well.
- NAMI did a great job at our last meeting talking about how many cases that they can diffuse and not need to transfer to 911 or request a community response.
- A long-term goal to explore the idea of Chicago fire department for certain situations being able to transport somebody to an alternate destination. Chicago Fire department when they wind up on scene with a behavioral health situation right now their option is an emergency department or perhaps a refusal. It would be real benefit to the people because emergency departments were good at a lot of things. Behavioral health is still something we need to work on.
- Chicago police department can also transport to emergency departments. They also have a list of approved facilities that you can see on their directives and these include some mental health facility, direct transport facilities that Chicago Fire department can't transport to.
- The care team can do all of these as well as alternative facilities. There's been some really innovative responses for the care team over the past couple of years about where they could take somebody to best meet the resources that they need.
- And mobile crisis response can do emergency departments you know alternate repossession shelters, like what the care team care team could do already.
988/NAMI :
Hyperlocal Level:
Additional topics:
Chicago CARE Pilot:
- Rolling off CPD and CFD
- Currently, fully staffed up with crisis clinicians and EMTs that operate under CDPH and have onboarded an EMT supervisor, Lisa.
- The plan is to do phased hiring, to be able to do geographic expansion, additional geographic expansion by the end of this year to two more police districts and then do hours expansion to get to evenings and weekends next year and also have a little more staff leeway so that if someone's out on medical or PTO or any other reason. The purpose is to show we are not as hard pressed to make sure that all the vans are up and our staff all have a little more breathing room.
- Phase hiring has been put in place so the company can be more operationally sound
- The mayor introduced the budget, there is close communication with all parties, but we'll wait to see where everything lands.
- 14 positions at OEMC for behavioral health telecommunication made it into the budget
- Right now, we have police side and fireside telecommunicators both call takers and dispatchers and have struggled a lot with our primary dispatch because this is sending out a very different type of units.
- Making them switch their brain on and off from dispatching care and it's just a lot of folks who've been trained to send out a very specific resource and it's hard to change muscle memory when you're working in a crisis navigation system. So, we are hiring telecommunicators.
- It is in the budget to hire telecommunicators, supervisors, and data analyst to also help with some quality assurance across the board and an assistant director level roles that there's someone overseeing this because it is basically creating a whole new vertical at OEMC.
- Job descriptions are starting to be written and working with human resources who are all working together with OEMC CDPH, and region eleven.
- Funding for that comes from the emergency telephone systems surcharge fund, which can only be used for telecommunication, it's not corporate, it's not ARPA.
- The funds that can only be used at OEMC or OPSA and OEMC was on board with using the funds this way.
- While we're going through the transition waiting to finalize our IDPH certification for our EMTs, which we are very close. Our paper application was good. We're just waiting for the last few supplies to come in so they can check our vans.
- Our teams have still been busy finishing up their training, doing area familiarization with all of our staff, including our new staff and also going to encampments and other sort of one-off needs that aren't through 911 but certainly could use care help.
- A lot of logistics where we can be up and running through 911 and that should be sometime around Thanksgiving, and we want to have our teams back up before we announce the expansion with the mayor in December.
- Being back up and running through 911, until the telecommunicators are hired, we'll continue running through the CFD side.
- Dispatch happens through the fire side, so that's where we have a stop gap in place until we do the hiring and the goal is to hire the assistant director level person first so that leadership is on board to help shape the rest of the program but already have the job description for the telecommunicators done, so that we're clear on what they are supervising and what kind of skills are needed to supervise it.
Questions from the Committee:
- Mention of the cadence of the meetings as well as the frequency of the meetings were discussed
- Broader expansion of the pilot and the training behind it
Public Comment:
Next Steps:
- Next meeting Jan 27,2025
- Goals for the RAC in 2025
- One goal would be if we could eventually at the end of 2025 besides the integration of behavioral health telecommunicators to also offer an option for 911 to 988 transfer for certain low risk calls.
- Trying to better understand and just integrate our community response to into the system.
Meeting adjourned at 1:38PM
