Scaling Up the Mobile Crisis Workforce in Illinois

Mobile crisis services provide a community-based alternative to mental health crisis intervention by offering de-escalation, triage, and referral services. When possible, such services help to decrease emergency room visits, inpatient hospitalization, and justice-system involvement. Per guidance from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), mobile crisis teams work in dyads, with one member of the dyad being a peer support specialist, and the other being a clinical professional. Peer support specialists on mobile crisis teams aim to provide supportive care to individuals in crisis from the perspective of lived experience with a behavioral health condition.To adhere to the SAMSHA recommendations and meet the needs of their population, in 2021 the Illinois Department of Behavioral Health and Recovery (DBHR) created a grant program called Program 590 to support mobile crisis infrastructure and operations across the state. That same year, DBHR also enacted a grant program called the Certified Recovery Support Specialist Success Program (CRSS-SP), which provides grants to educational institutions like community colleges to train individuals with lived experience of mental illness to become peer support specialists. To date, there has been no evaluation of the impact of any policy designed to increase the number peer specialists in a mobile crisis workforce. My objective for this dissertation is to evaluate the current state of the mobile crisis workforce pipeline in IL and determine strategies to meet the needs of this workforce going forward. My specific aims are: Aim 1a: Qualitatively document factors and potential policy solutions to increase the capacity of the mobile crisis workforce in IL. Aim 1b: Use Group Model Building (GMB) to model the mobile crisis workforce pipeline in IL, build stakeholder insight into relevant challenges, and document factors affecting hiring, retention, and the size and adequacy of applicant pools. Aim 2: Determine significant predictors of progression through the CRSS-SP and into the crisis workforce. Aim 3: Utilize system dynamics simulation modeling to generate recommendations capable of meeting the mobile crisis workforce the needs in IL over the next 10 years.