New Vista Health and Substance Use Services Mobile Crisis Unit is the Behavioral Health Center as a way of bringing care to patients wherever they are.

We paid a visit to the program at New Vista's Lexington campus.

Where the Community Mental Health Center for the Bluegrass Region, which is Lexington and the surrounding Fayette County and the surrounding counties.

So in total that 17 counties and we are the safety net for all behavioral health services.

The idea is to go out into the community, whether it be schools, primary care office instead of law enforcement, whether they're calling our nine, eight, eight or one 809 two 8000 crisis number and they're the client or the family member is dealing with a behavioral health crisis that we respond either through consulting over the phone or going to the scene.

And we go out in pairs.

We provide assessment.

We connect as needed and we try to avoid people going to emergency rooms or the police being called and connect them more with behavioral health services.

So say it's a caller that's in crisis and they're calling either our nine, eight, eight number or one 800 number.

I will say that most of those calls, at least 80%, are resolved on the phone.

If they do go to mobile crisis, our hotline or crisis line will triage it, connect them with the mobile crisis team, and they will either go through or routinely aid that kind of triage as the call or directly to the team member that is on shift to go out and they find out kind of what's going on, what is needed.

For the most part, we can respond within an hour.

Our teams are spread out.

Our staff are spread out over 17 counties.

If they don't want to wait for a transfer station and someone to come to the scene, we can also provide telehealth.

But I think we're really fortunate in our region, especially with Lexington Police, that most of the Lexington police officers are city trained, which is crisis intervention teams, which are police training for behavioral health response.

So that helps them respond or that helps them have the tools to respond.

However, having a mental health professional respond when someone is struggling with a mental health crisis makes more sense than a police response.

So it's the same idea of if you're having a medical health crisis, you don't usually call the police.

You call an ambulance to treat the medical issues if you're having a behavioral health crisis.

Calling us, we're not.

And uniform, that's our specialty is behavioral health care.

New Vista has been given the federal designation of Certified Community Behavioral Health Center, allowing it to further expand its services.