As part of an ongoing effort to transform North Carolina’s behavioral health crisis response system, the N.C. Department of Health and Human Services announced Wednesday a $22 million investment to expand community crisis centers — including opening a new one in Alamance County — and peer respite care across the state.
This will increase North Carolina’s capacity for community-based crisis treatment by 20%, helping to ensure people experiencing a behavioral health crisis have alternative options to emergency departments or community and state psychiatric hospitals when seeking care, DHHS Secretary Kody H. Kinsley said.
“We’re making big changes to North Carolina’s behavioral health care system,” he said. “We’re building more options for the right level of care when someone is in crisis, and better services upstream to help prevent people ever needing crisis resources in the first place.”
NCDHHS’ investment will support five new community crisis centers (called Facility-Based Crisis Centers) for adults in Alamance, Forsyth, New Hanover, Pitt and Vance counties and three new community crisis centers for children in Gaston, Pitt and Vance counties.
Facility-Based Crisis Centers provide short-term inpatient mental health stabilization and substance use detox for people in the community who otherwise would need to go to a hospital.
The new investment will create an additional 60 beds for adults and 44 beds for children, helping to reduce the burden on emergency rooms, community and state psychiatric hospitals.
The department partnered with Local Management Entity/Managed Care Organizations (LME/MCOs) to select counties based on several criteria, including regional data on the number of individuals waiting for behavioral health care in emergency departments and the distance to other community behavioral health services.
The new centers will join a network of 24 facility-based crisis centers in 22 other counties across the state.
More than $130 million of the historic $835 million investment in behavioral health in the 2023 state budget is dedicated to improving North Carolina’s crisis response system. Behavioral health urgent care centers, Facility-Based Crisis Centers and peer respite programs are part of a package of new investments that will advance North Carolina’s behavioral crisis response system by improving options from the moment of crisis to the point of care, DHHS said.
