The Blaine County Sheriff’s Office and Family Health Services plan to put into operation in April a co-response team to respond to possible mental-health-related calls. The goal of the team is to join first responders to provide medical care and follow-up care for individuals who may be experiencing a mental health crisis.
Family Health Services is a nonprofit federally-qualified health center based in Twin Falls with an office in Bellevue, serving primary care and behavioral health regardless of an individual’s income or ability to pay.
The clinician-led co-response crisis team will pair a behavioral health deputy from the Blaine County Sheriff’s Office with a licensed mental health clinician employed by Family Health Services to respond to calls involving a potential mental health crisis.
“The purpose of this team is to make an educated decision about how best to support an individual,” said Blaine County Sheriff Morgan Ballis. “Mental health calls are a significant amount of the call load for law enforcement, fire and emergency response services. The biggest gap we have right now is that we have no system or ability to follow up after the initial call.”
Ballis said without the team, officers might bring an offender to jail if a crime has been committed or to a hospital if medical attention is needed.
“It’s beyond our scope to do any follow up on the mental health side,” Ballis said. “If they go the hospital there may also be no follow up on their end because they are only treating someone in the emergency room.”
“Sometimes we can do nothing to help because we are responding as law enforcement and it may not meet the threshold of a mental health hold,” Ballis said. He said the threshold would only be met if the individual was deemed to be potentially harmful to self or others.
“The power of the team is to be proactive and follow up to help a person or family members get the services that they need,” he said. “Communities similar to ours with these teams have seen up to a 70% reduction in emergency room visits, arrests and calls for service that are driven by an underlying mental health component.”
The team will operate 40 hours per week and respond to probable mental health calls in plain clothes and in an unmarked vehicle.
Ballis said the team will be housed under the Sheriff’s Office and be available to all law enforcement agencies in Blaine County. He said interviews for the clinician and officer position are underway and that the program should be up and running by the end of April.
Ballis said the Blaine County commissioners approved a new deputy position cost of $90,000 a year for the officer portion of the team. Funding for the clinician position will come from a three-year pilot grant procured by TogetherWe, formerly the Mental Well-Being Initiative, through a $4.43 million grant in 2025 from the St. Luke’s Wood River Foundation.
TogetherWe Executive Director Jenna Vagias said she could not share the cost of the privately-funded clinician position.
Ballis said other communities using co-response teams have seen significant reductions in cost related to mental health calls.
“Our goal is to show the cities the cost savings of our team in hopes that they will contribute to future costs of the team,” he said.