GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – Brown County officials unveiled a new crisis treatment center on Monday, with hopes of improving crisis services with a one-stop shop for providing provide emergency mental health services.
“Go through the crisis assessment, medical stability, if you’re going to be admitted to our facility you’re basically going down the hall. So it’s not like you’re going from a crisis center to a hospital to a facility, it’s all one campus,” said Brown County Executive Director of Human Services Erik Pritzl. “What is causing them to feel that the crisis is what it is? Then if you have medical screening on site, you don’t have to go to an emergency room to have that medical screening done unless it’s a high-need situation.”
The Crisis Center, located at the Brown County Community Treatment Center, includes a team of full-time crisis counselors and part time staff with extensive training in providing crisis care. That staff will work closely with county and private providers to connect people with the appropriate services and care at no cost.
“Some of them will be doing assessments here, as well as counselors going out into the community. So we will continue to respond to the jail, the hospitals, the schools, or wherever we’re needed,” said Family Services Crisis Center Program Manager, Jenny Younk. “If a medical screening is needed, the crisis counselor will escort that individual back to the medical provider, provide them the information that they need to do their role. Then from there, that person would potentially hand off to the mental health provider.”
“People that come here usually experience some acute need. It could be depression, it could be suicide, it could be a medication issue where they haven’t taken the medication for a period of time the symptoms have started to get to the point where they can’t manage them anymore,” Pritzl told WTAQ News. “We can treat them on site, get them stabilized, and back to their homes and community.”
Younk says they typically meet with about 5,500 people each year. 40% are through mobile means, but the rest are either walk-ins or brought in by law enforcement or family members. She says the streamlined services provide for better continuity of care for anyone who needs help.
“Every time somebody re-tells their story, it can be re-traumatizing. It’s one more person hearing and seeing your pain, one more time that you have to share that with somebody and expose yourself and be vulnerable,” Younk explained. “The story’s been told. We can share that information without putting them through that process of opening up again and possibly being questioned, probed, or just being asked more than they really need to be asked.”
She also hopes the new program will cut what is currently a three-hour process from screening to placement, to about an hour and a half.
The other advantage of a one-stop shop is the ability to give community partners like law enforcement and certain healthcare workers more time to get to other pressing matters.
“[Getting] that law enforcement back on the street as soon as possible eliminate the tax on the emergency rooms of having individuals coming in for some basic vitals and labs,” Younk said.
“In multiple stops, going crisis center, hospital, facility – that’s multiple trips. It’s also getting somebody in and out of the squad car. So we’re trying to make sure that this is quicker more efficient but also safer,” Pritzl said. “It’s difficult because you don’t know the consumers are coming forward each time. You don’t know if you have a lot of high need medical consumers or low needs. But the ideas are going to save law enforcement time, and we’re trying quantify that over time and see those detention times drop…If we can avoid them going to the emergency department, they don’t to be supervised there, they don’t have to be examined there, we can take care of it here. We have to get our staff hired then we can take care of that.”
The $2.2 million center, at 3150 Gershwin Ave., was funded through the Debt Reduction, Infrastructure, and Property Tax Relief Plan. It officially opens on June 1st.
