Opening Crisis Triage Center means closing a long-standing gap in services

The Doña Ana County Crisis Triage Center (CTC) is not a hospital or a jail. As the name implies, the CTC will be a place where people in crisis can go to find guest recliners and client rooms instead of hospital beds or jail cells.

Visitors will be called guests (as suggested by National Alliance on Mental Illness board member Micah Pearson of Las Cruces) rather than patients or inmates.

County Manager Fernando Macias and Health and Human Services Department Director Jaime Michael lauded the county commission for its August vote to hire Recovery Innovations International (RI) to license and operate the CTC, which has stood vacant since construction was completed in 2013.

RI, a Phoenix-based nonprofit, offers behavioral health services in crisis, health, recovery and consulting, according to https://riinternational.com/. RI operates a dozen facilities across the country that are similar to the CTC, Macias said, and has “a history of getting these operations up off the ground.”

The commission’s vote “has allowed all this to happen,” said Michael, who also praised Macias for “the credibility he brings to this issue.”

“We finally had a county commission that made this call,” said Macias. The commission decided to “stop talking and make the hard decision,” he said.

 Macias said opening the CTC will be “life changing” and “life-saving.”

A former Doña Ana County commissioner, state senator and district court judge who is in his second stint as county manager, Macias said the absence of a triage center “gnaws at me. I’ve seen the consequences of not having the right services available.”

Macias and Michael said county staff, behavioral health advocates and people with what Michael calls “lived experience,” have also been vital to the collaboration that will make the CTC’s opening within the next few months possible.

Macias said important changes have taken place in the past 18 months that allow the county to move forward with opening the CTC, including the state’s licensing process for the facility and allowing the use of federal Medicaid dollars to pay for CTC services.

Without the changes, Macias said, the county could not have operated the facility in a fiscally sustainable way. The county’s cost to run the CTC, previously estimated at $1.4 million annually, will be $263,500 for the 10 months of the first year of its contract with RI, he said.

Macias said the application to license the facility was expected to be filed by Aug. 31, which was the timeframe RI had initially outlined.

Some who come to the CTC will need immediate basic services like a meal (from the kitchen at the nearby county Detention Center), a shower or a place to wash clothes. Or, he or she may need a quiet place to sit, Michael said.

Macias and Michael said the average stay at facilities like the CTC is five-seven hours. A guest will be able to stay a maximum of 23 hours, but can’t remain overnight. The CTC will open initially for 16-hour days and then expand to 24-7 service, Michael said.