For East Baton Rouge Parish to attack what is being called a mental health crisis, agencies and organizations on the front lines need to leave their silos to operate as one unit, according to a mental health report released Monday by the Baton Rouge Area Foundation.
Stakeholder agencies and organizations need a more proactive approach that allows for planning and expansion of services, the report goes on to say. Commissioned by BRAF and created by Michigan-based Health Management Associates, the report calls for the adoption of a ‘population health strategy’ to address Baton Rouge’s mental health crisis.
“This continuum-of-care approach moves people to their highest level of functioning with interventions at early signs of worsening condition and keeps people functioning within their community,” the report says.
BRAF unveiled the report at a news conference held Monday. Local officials, such as Mayor Kip Holden, Baton Rouge Police Chief Carl Dabadie, Sheriff Sid Gautreaux and District Attorney Hillar Moore III, touted the need to change how the city-parish handles its mentally ill citizens.
“We are dealing with an issue that does not call too much for debate,” Holden said.
The report calls for a multi-pronged plan that includes the creation of a nonprofit organization to operate a diversion center.
Dubbed the BRidge Center, law enforcement would bring mentally ill individuals there as opposed to emergency rooms or to the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison. Medicaid expansion dollars, as well as other funding streams, would help cover many of the services envisioned at the center.
The center would include sobering beds, a detox treatment and a stabilizing program for those in a psychiatric crisis who do not need to be committed to an inpatient facility. Families would also be allowed to drop loved ones off at the center.
To implement the strategy, all the stakeholders would gather under the leadership of a third-party consultant or the nonprofit company that manages the BRidge Center. The stakeholders would need to agree to a Memorandum of Understanding, or a similar arrangement, outlining the responsibilities and services each organization or agency would provide.
There also would be ways to measure if each agencies and organizations are doing what they are supposed to do, the report says.
The authors note that currently each agency and organization dedicated to addressing mental health in the Capital Region has limited funding that allows only for limited essential services.
“The behavioral health care system is fragmented, inefficient, and fails to meet the needs of this vulnerable population,” the report says, adding critical services are mostly unfunded, while case and care management are nonexistent.
“These factors, combined with the realities of the current Louisiana healthcare environment, mean that people with serious behavioral health issues in EBR often are able to access care only when they get extremely sick,” the report says. “The result is a crisis: behaviors are being addressed at inappropriate levels of service such as emergency departments and inpatient units, and the mentally ill are criminalized when resources become overburdened with patients requiring care.”
—Ryan Broussard
