Community Healthlink to partner with Worcester on crisis response

Photo | Courtesy of UMass Memorial Health Tamara Lundi, CEO and president of Community Healthlink

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By Alexander MacDougall

Community Healthlink, an organization within the UMass Memorial Health system that provides mental health services, has been chosen by the City of Worcester to assist a new crisis response model for 911 calls.

The new model will see crisis teams formed by Community Healthlink to accompany police officers to certain emergency calls, such as welfare or safety checks. Tamara Lundi, CEO and president of Community Healthlink in Worcester, said the organization’s internal studies showed thousands of 911 calls made over the past several years would have been applicable to the new model.

“We anticipate this model to be really an opportunity to leverage CHL’s behavioral and health expertise, and leveraging the Worcester police and other first responders’ expertise that already exists within our community,” said Lundi.

Though certain crisis-response programs have assisted law enforcement already in the city, such as in the form of mental health professionals doing ride-alongs with police, the new program intends to be a substantial augmentation of providing mental health assistance to 911 calls. The plan has drawn inspiration from similar efforts in other parts of the country, such as the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Ore., and crisis response models in Atlanta.

Lundi said those programs, as well as the new model being introduced in Worcester, could serve as a future model to responding to crisis situations in the state of Massachusetts.

“What they found was that as community members began to understand that these individuals were working with police officers, but not necessarily officers themselves, and this was the kind of support that they could bring,” said Lundi. “In Atlanta, the crisis response members wear purple shirts, and people would actually call 911 asking for a purple-shirt person.”

The City of Worcester has currently committed $1 million in its 2022 budget to develop the model together with CHL. The process is expected to take 9-12 months to fully implement, said Lundi.