photo by: Treatment & Recovery Center

The Treatment & Recovery Center at 1000 W. Second Street is pictured.

More than 200 people per month are coming into Douglas County’s Treatment & Recovery Center for mental health crisis, and most are voluntarily seeking treatment or arriving with a friend or family member, city commissioners were told Tuesday.

Just a handful of patients per week are being brought in by local law enforcement agencies, but the impact the center has on the work of police officers goes far beyond those numbers, Lawrence Police Chief Rich Lockhart said Tuesday.

“For us, it really has been a game-changer,” Lockhart told commissioners.

Prior to the opening of the center, which is located at 1000 W. Second St. near Lawrence Memorial Hospital, officers often spent hours at LMH waiting for a detainee who was suffering from a mental health crisis to be medically cleared before the individual could be booked into the Douglas County Jail.

Now, Lockhart said a safe place for those individuals who are clearly in crisis is the Treatment & Recovery Center rather than the jail. He said officers are able to drop those detainees off at the center to be evaluated by staff at the TRC. Police officers generally are back on the street in less than five minutes from the time that they bring an individual to the TRC, he said.

Lockhart, though, said the biggest difference is the TRC is equipped with health care professionals who can provide appropriate care for people in mental crisis, whereas such services at the jail are limited.

“We take people there, and they are not trying to find a way to send people somewhere else,” Lockhart said of the TRC staff. “They are trying to find a way to take them and find the right care at the right time at the right place, and that is really serving our community better.”

The TRC has two units, Director Bri Harmon-Moore told commissioners. One unit is for urgent care cases. Individuals stay for less than 24 hours, and it often is the area the TRC uses for patients who are detoxing from drugs or alcohol. The second unit is more of an inpatient area that allows for treatment of up to 72 hours.

Harmon-Moore gave city commissioners several other statistics about the center, which partially opened in April 2023 and fully opened about a month later. They included:

• Through September of this year, the center is averaging 218 clients per month. That’s up from an average of 171 clients per month that the center saw during its partial opening in 2023.

• Those 218 clients per month are producing, on average, 308 crisis episodes in a month. Those numbers are a sign that some clients are seeking treatment in the center multiple times per month, Harmon-Moore said. She said the center’s recidivism rate is high — about 30%, she estimated — but also said that was to be expected given the nature of mental health crisis. She said the center releases every patient with a detailed outpatient treatment plan, and follows up with each patient within two days to remind them of appointments and to assess how they are following through on the plan.

• Wait times for patients to be seen by a health care professional at the center currently average 26 minutes.

• About 97% of the time TRC staff members are able to develop a treatment plan that allows individuals to stay in the community, as opposed to being transferred to facilities outside of the county.

• Harmon-Moore said the center is seeing some individuals from counties other than Douglas County. While she didn’t have specific statistics to share, when asked by a commissioner she said that “truly, the bulk of people we see are from Douglas County.”

In other business, commissioners at their weekly meeting:

• Approved a nearly $160,000 design contract to create a new secured parking area for law enforcement vehicles at the Lawrence Police Headquarters in west Lawrence. The project, which is expected to incorporate solar panels that could be used as part of a vehicle charging system, is budgeted to cost about $1.1 million to build. Construction work could begin this summer.