Supervisors approve Tri-City mental health agreement
San Diego Union-TribuneJan 14, 2020
With little further discussion, county supervisors swiftly approved a
Tri-City's governing board approved the essential documents for the unit, which replaces one it shut down in 2018, during a special meeting Monday.
The pair of approvals ends 18 months of uncertainty regarding how Tri-City's sidelined psychiatric capacity will be replaced, though doing so will not happen overnight. Now that the shape of the deal has coalesced, experts estimate it will take between two and three years to design, permit and build the unit, which will be detached from Tri-City's sprawling main structure.
By the time the new facility is online, three to four years will have passed since Tri-City stopped admitting psychiatric inpatients, meaning that other facilities in
The county has said it intends to add a crisis stabilization center in
Dr.
The developments voted on Monday and Tuesday represent the first in what are expected to be a long chain of actions that attempt to take a more proactive approach to mental health care, extending access to counseling and care coordination that planners hope will result in fewer hospitalizations and fewer law enforcement holds.
"We're taking the blueprint we've done on all of these other chronic conditions and applying it to behavioral health," Macchione said.
Those whose family members have long fought mental illnesses seem, for the moment, to have had a positive response to the plans as they've been laid out so far, especially to the idea of creating several county-run mental health "hubs" that would provide crisis stabilization and regular follow-up counseling on a walk-in basis.
"We are going to watch it closely but, hopefully, we have turned a corner," Bagby said.
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