The Kentucky Injury Prevention and Research Center has been connecting Kentuckians to substance use disorder treatment options for years through its website.

Find help now Kentucky dot org.

But now it has added another branch to include mental health resources.

We talked with an official to learn more about how the center is continuing to connect individuals to resources.

Find help now.

Dot org was created in 2018 to serve as a rapid linkage to care tool.

So we work with hundreds of treatment facilities across the state of Kentucky that offer substance use disorder, treatment services, everything from outpatient to long term residential.

They create facility profiles on the website and they update their bed availability on a scheduled routine basis.

That way, we know and are confident that the resources that we're providing to the general public or to any referral professional are accurate and up to date.

So anyone who's interested in searching for treatment can go to our website, enter some search criteria.

You can also enter in as little or as much information as you want, and it's all location based.

So you're instantly provided with the list of treatment facilities closest to the zip code or city that you enter that have available beds right then when you're searching.

It was created because there really was no tool available for the state to link people to treatment quickly.

So the time that it would take, oftentimes people in the emergency department, health care professionals, also police or law enforcement, it would oftentimes take them or their staff several hours to seven days to try to find a treatment facility that offered the services that they needed.

The payment sources that were required with availability across the state.

We actually just launched in March of this year a new branch of Find help now that includes mental health treatment services.

And so people are looking for mental health treatment, counseling, crisis intervention and then we also just launched a community resources tool that has it right now, has about 1100 community resources.

And these have all been vetted by the staff here at Brick, but they are social service resources.

So food banks, housing shelters, places where people can find clothing, financial resources, legal assistance, residential substance use disorder.

Treatment is a very common search, as well as the crisis.

Stabilization units have also been a common search.

And we see a lot of our searches and some of the bigger metropolitan areas.

But they're not too far ahead or those numbers aren't much greater than some of the rural areas in the state as well.

Since the launch of Find Mental Health Now K Whiteboard in March, there has been over 5,001st time users to the center's website.