Understanding Alternative Mobile Services

  • What Are Alternative Mobile Services?

    Alternative mobile services encompass a variety of responses to the immediate needs and crisis situations in the community. Mobile services can include street outreach vans that provide supplies and support to the homeless, municipalities or agencies which provide dispatched in-person mobile response teams to those in crisis, and hospital-based outreach programs which provide services to their patients. A mobile service is simply a service that works with high-need populations and meets them where they’re at, in their own space, to get them the help they need in a moment of need or distress.

  • There are a wide variety of mobile crisis team services active in the US, and in almost every state. The configurations match the needs of their communities - frontier, rural, suburban, or urban - and are shaped by both available funding and perceived needs in those communities. No one team configuration is by presumed better than another, but standard features include ~

  • Two person teams, pairing a combination of emergency medical technicians, social workers, nurses, peer workers, or similarly skilled persons Dispatched by 911, 988, 311, or local crisis lines, and can also be self-dispatched to arrive quickly Are attached to local services, such as shelter, detoxification, hospitals, treatment centers for mental illness and addiction Provides follow-up services and warm handoffs to referral agencies Use electronic health records, computer-aided dispatch, and other records-keeping to collect and share data