Bellwater General Health System is launching a 24-hour mental health crisis line, hospital officials announced this week, aiming to give residents a phone number to call before a psychiatric crisis becomes an emergency room visit or a police call.
The line, which will be staffed by twelve licensed clinicians rotating around the clock, is meant to give residents in psychiatric distress somewhere to call before a situation becomes an emergency room visit or a police call, according to Dr. Angela Whitcombe, chief executive of Bellwater General Health System.
“We kept seeing the same pattern in our emergency department data,” Whitcombe said. “Somebody in crisis at eleven at night has almost nowhere to turn except 911 or our ER, and neither of those is designed to de-escalate a mental health crisis. This line is designed to be that off-ramp.”
Built on an existing expansion
The crisis line builds on a broader behavioral-health expansion the hospital system began several years ago, which has included additional inpatient beds and addiction-medicine specialists embedded in the emergency department. Whitcombe said that expansion helped cut the share of overdose patients discharged without a treatment referral from roughly 40 percent to under 15 percent, and hospital officials are hoping for a similar effect on psychiatric crisis calls.
Dr. Patricia Yeun, the hospital system’s director of behavioral health services, said the line will triage callers by phone and, when needed, dispatch a mobile crisis team rather than police. “A badge and a squad car escalate a lot of situations that a trained clinician can talk down,” Castillo said. “Our mobile team can meet somebody at home, at a shelter, wherever they are, and figure out whether they need a hospital bed or just somebody to help them make a plan for the next 24 hours.”
Castillo said the hospital projects roughly 3,000 calls in the line’s first year, based on regional call-volume data and the system’s own emergency department numbers, though she cautioned that projection could be low. “Every system that’s launched one of these underestimates the first-year volume,” she said. “People have been needing this option. We just haven’t been offering it.”
Questions about staffing
The announcement comes as Bellwater General’s broader nursing staff faces a persistent vacancy rate, a strain hospital officials have acknowledged in recent budget discussions. Council Member Gary Petrowski, who represents Cedar Hollow, welcomed the crisis line but pressed Whitcombe on whether the hospital could staff it without pulling clinicians from other stretched departments.
“My constituents have been asking for something like this for years,” Petrowski said. “But I’ve also heard from nurses at that hospital who are working mandatory overtime. I want to know this isn’t solved by moving people from one shortage to plug another.”
Whitcombe said the twelve clinicians staffing the line are a mix of new hires and existing behavioral-health staff, and that the line is funded through a combination of the hospital’s own budget and a state behavioral-health grant, not by reassigning emergency department nursing staff. “This isn’t robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she said. “It’s a separate program with its own budget line, though I won’t pretend our overall staffing picture isn’t something we’re actively working on.”
A partner in the county
Dr. Kwame Asare, director of the Wentworth County Department of Health, said the county plans to route some of its own crisis calls to the hospital line rather than duplicating services, an arrangement he said took months to work out. “We didn’t want two separate hotlines competing for the same callers and the same clinicians,” Asare said. “The hospital has resources we don’t, and we have relationships in neighborhoods the hospital doesn’t always reach. This lets us point people toward one number instead of three.”
The line is expected to begin taking calls next month, reachable through a local number that will also connect to the national 988 suicide and crisis line for callers who need that service instead. Whitcombe said the hospital will track call outcomes for the first six months and report the data to the county board as part of the annual behavioral-health budget review.
“I don’t expect this to solve everything on its own,” Whitcombe said. “But if it keeps even a few hundred people a year out of handcuffs or an ER bed when what they actually needed was somebody to answer the phone, that’s a program worth funding.”
Modeled on other cities, adapted for Bellwater
Castillo said the hospital studied crisis-line models in several similarly sized metro areas before settling on its staffing structure, opting for a smaller in-house team over a larger contracted call center after concluding that continuity mattered more than raw capacity. “A caller who gets the same handful of clinicians over multiple calls, if they need to call back, builds trust faster than someone who gets a different stranger every time,” she said. “We decided that was worth the higher per-call cost.”
The hospital is also coordinating with Bellwater Public Schools on a protocol for when the line receives calls involving minors, an area Castillo said required separate legal and clinical review. “A crisis call involving a teenager isn’t the same as one involving an adult, both in terms of what we’re legally required to do and in terms of how you actually talk somebody that age through a hard night,” she said. “We brought in the district’s student services office to help us get that part right before we ever took a call.”
Whitcombe said the hospital will publish quarterly summary statistics on call volume and outcomes, though not identifying details, in an effort to build public trust in a service that depends on people believing their call will be handled with confidentiality. “People won’t use a crisis line they don’t trust,” she said. “We’d rather be transparent about the aggregate numbers than ask the public to take that trust on faith.”