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New SCOUT Unit takes on Mental Health Crisis
Derek Kreider, Akron Beacon Journal
The Summit County Outreach Team (SCOUT) is revolutionizing how nonviolent psychiatric emergencies are handled in Akron.
Where someone in the throes of a mental health crisis may once have ended up in the hospital or in jail, the SCOUT team connects them with the help they need, keeping them in the community.
The personnel staffing the team play off each others’ strengths to accomplish their mission. In the car is an Akron Fire Department paramedic, police officer, and clinician from Portage Path Behavioral Health. The Summit County Alcohol, Drug Addiction and Mental Health Services board (ADM) is also a program partner.
Akron Police Lt. Greg Joyce, a proponent of community policing, recently described how the new approach is opening doors.
Joyce said that Autumn Goffinet, the unit’s chief clinician, had the idea of bringing food to someone who wanted nothing to do with the team. That tactic was a revelation for Joyce, something that’s not normally done in his line of work. “I never even once thought that’s even an option, that we could stop at a food bank and get food for people,” he said.
“Having a paramedic with us at the same time is great, too,” he said, “because just being able to check people’s vitals, make sure that you know medically they’re safe and things like that. It’s a lot different than working by myself in my police car.”
Xavier Brown, one of the unit’s paramedics, said he watched Goffinet provide a woman with some needed resources. “I mean, it felt good that we were able to kind of give her that stuff, and for me to see firsthand that there were other things that could have been done to give a positive impact â other than a police car or ambulance to hospital,” Brown said.
In addition to providing food to people and checking their vitals, Goffinet said that the team has made recommendations for elderly patients “to Direction Home, getting services through Passport to come in and check on them.” “It’s just extra eyes, you know; they can get things like food delivery, nurse’s aides,” she said, in the hopes of reducing their reliance on Akron’s emergency services.
“Our goal is to reduce people going to jail, going to the hospitals,” said Goffinet. “Of course, sometimes that’s necessary, but ideally we want to continue to provide these services in-home so that they can have functioning lives and be where they want to be.”
What are the team’s everyday operations like?
The unit starts the day by checking to see if there are calls it can respond to immediately.
“So the kind of calls we look for are nonviolent mental health issue calls,” Joyce said. Most of their eight-hour shift, he said, is spent respon
ding to calls usually handled by police.
The number of incidents they respond to in a day varies, Brown said. Sometimes they’ll field seven or more, sometimes less. Typically, it’s around three or four.
Who takes the lead on a call depends on the situation. “Typically, the social worker will approach first,” said Brianna Day, the mobile crisis unit manager with Portage Path Behavioral Health. She fills in for Goffinet as needed and acts as her supervisor.
“But if we’re unsure, the officer will go up with us.” The officer and paramedic must be trained in crisis intervention, she said. SCOUT often gets referrals from police officers who are responding to multiple calls from the same people, Joyce said.
“When we’re not answering calls,” Joyce said, “we’re trying to go check on people, see if we can provide any resources, things like that.”
Team members build trust through follow-up check-ins
Being able to follow up with people is new for two of the team’s members.
Brown said that there are people who call for help daily whom he sees in the normal course of his duties as a paramedic. “But here it’s more structured,” he said, “where it’s kind of planned that every day that you come in, you know that in between the priority calls, you’re going to go back and you’re going to follow up with somebody else who needed the service the day before, or whatever. And a lot of times it just so happens that it is people that I run into on the ambulance that we’re following up with now with the (team).”
Joyce said on some patrol calls, he might leave the scene wishing he could’ve done more to help, but there’s not an opportunity to follow up.
Goffinet said th
at one man they’ve been visiting on a regular basis for the past four months recently agreed to seek help.
“So it’s nice because we get to see and deal with these people and develop more of a rapport with them than I would traditionally as a patrol call,” said Joyce.
What’s next for SCOUT?
While the program is still just an experiment, Brown, Day, Joyce and Goffinet all agree the whole county could benefit from the team’s services.
Akron Fire Department EMS Capt. Dan Garrett helps the team get what they need to be successful, and reports back to stakeholders, the ADM board, Portage Path and police and fire administration.
“Collaborations on the team bleed into all the departments and all the divisions in Akron,” Garrett said. “Each one of these team members is going back into their regular assigned positions and letting them know the resources that are out there, because that’s a huge gap in health care in the nation â not just Akron, but in the nation â is connecting the dots of where the resources are.”
Asked what he would say to someone with the power to determine whether the program should expand, Brown asks, “if not us, then who?”
Brown said, “You know who up the buck, who picks up the torch to say, Hey, this is a problem, and we want to try to curb it, and, send it in the other direction to where we can actually make an impact.”
Article Written by Derek Kreider, The Akron Beacon Journal. October 2, 2024. beaconjournal.com
https://www.beaconjournal.com/story/news/local/2024/10/02/akrons-scout-unit-is-changing-how-the-community-interacts-with-safety-forces/74871511007/