MADISON, Wis. — Madison’s CARES program continues to eye an expansion, with the city working to hire an additional team to add weekend service.
The program, which launched in September 2021, serves as an alternative to sending police officers to calls involving mental and behavioral health. Instead of sending police, a paramedic from the Madison Fire Department and a crisis worker from Journey Mental Health respond to those calls.
Service originally started on weekdays because those were the busiest days for mental and behavioral health calls, said Che Stedman, the fire department’s assistant chief of medical affairs. Now, the city’s 2023 budget provides more money to expand the program, and the city is looking for a paramedic and crisis worker for the weekend shift.
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“Crisis happens 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, right, and we’re just doing our best to cover the most important hours when we feel that the call volume is highest, so the fact that we’ve got Monday through Friday 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. covered currently just means that those weekend hours were our next opportunity to really catch another set of calls that are important,” he said.
The goal is to provide the same level of service on weekends as is currently in place on weekdays. In the long term, Stedman said the city hopes to be able to have a crisis response team able to respond at any time of day or night.
After starting with a single team focused on downtown Madison, the program expanded in July to add another team serving the west and south sides.
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The program not only provides a “better service… to the citizens and the public that are having behavioral health emergencies,” Stedman said; it has also freed up police resources to allow them to focus elsewhere.
“No matter how good a police officer is at their job, walking in with a gun on your hip and a badge on your chest into a behavioral health emergency can be a little escalating for people, and so the fact that the police department really is the catch-all for all those sort of extra emergencies out there besides people just breaking the law, you know, it really is difficult for them to navigate all these sort of behavioral health calls,” he said.
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