Crisis training starting; next step could be on-call crisis response team…
The Blaine County Mental Well-Being Initiative is moving from the data-collection phase into concrete actions—the first being a 40-hour mental-health-crisis training program for law enforcement personnel and first responders.
The initiative was spearheaded by the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation in May 2023 to enhance local mental-health resources. According to the foundation’s website, it involves a collaboration of over 35 partners, including local government and health-care, nonprofit, education, business and religious organizations.
The training program is a first step in addressing growing mental health challenges in the Wood River Valley, Blaine County prosecutor Matt Fredback said.
He said the next goal is to build an on-call crisis response team with counselors and other professionals with behavioral health expertise.
The initial training will take place in early December and will help local law enforcement personnel and first responders learn “de-escalation” tactics when responding to someone suffering a mental health crisis, and how to better identify when a mental illness is at play.
Fredback said crisis intervention can benefit people suffering such a crisis by keeping them at home and connecting them to appropriate resources. He said it can also benefit law enforcement personnel and first responders by preventing situations from escalating and maybe resulting in an arrest.
The training program emphasizes a collaborative approach across the community, bringing in an array of resources and expertise. Blaine County Sheriff’s Detective Kerri Taylor has played an instrumental role in developing the program, Fredback added.
Blaine County contributed $10,000 to the December training.
At a Nov. 5 meeting of the Blaine County commissioners, leaders of the Mental Well-Being Initiative updated the board on their progress across other areas.
St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation Chief Development Officer Megan Tanous said that for decades, various community health needs assessments and feedback from health care providers made it clear that “we needed to do something about mental health.” She said the initiative was launched in response to the question of “how can we come together, collectively, to address an issue that we know touches each and every one of us, and a lot of our county services?”
Tyler Norris, chair of the broader well-being initiative, talked about the effort to not just do one or two things well, but to build an infrastructure “with enough reach, intensity and duration for a population-level impact.” He also said a goal should be creating a community that promotes good mental health to begin with.
Based on numerous interviews, surveys and community meetings, Norris described the priorities that emerged: building resiliency skills among residents, addressing gaps in the access to and delivery of mental health care, increasing career pathways and training opportunities for providers and building a crisis response system—of which the training in December will be the first step.
