Statement from Public Safety Asst Director on OCHS Programming changes

Building on what we've learned, the program is entering a new phase and transitioning to a crisis response team model. The goal of this phase is to expand coverage, improve care, and enhance collaboration across our public safety network. 

This expansion will allow us to receive requests not only from all bureaus within Public Safety, but also from community and partner organizations. We've learned that police are not the only responders who want OCHS to meet them on a call. Clean and liens and demolitions often involve helping people who are squatting or otherwise invested in a property to get housing placement and/or other services. OCHS will now not only coordinate with police, but with EMS, Pittsburgh Fire, the Department of Permits, Licenses, and Inspections (PLI), the Department of Public Works (DPW), amongst others.  

Our goal is to provide more effective care to vulnerable residents while improving the utilization of public safety resources. The transition has been developed in close coordination with Public Safety and Police leadership to ensure alignment and continuity of service. 

The Crisis Response Team model is a nationally recognized, best-practice approach designed to deliver sustainable and clinically informed crisis services. The current OCHS social workers and clinicians will remain in their crisis response roles but paired together. Each unit will now consist of two mental health clinicians who provide on-scene and community-based crisis intervention and stabilization for individuals in crisis. Teams respond as a secondary unit once the scene has been cleared for safety. 

The City of Pittsburgh is not alone in making this shift to our co-response model. Across the country, the very success of programs like ours has led practitioners to acknowledge the need for community health responders to have dispatch and response capabilities akin to those of other public safety personnel. In making this change, we are implementing practices designed to enhance the way crises services are provided to our most vulnerable residents.    

Although clinicians will no longer ride in police vehicles, they will continue to support law enforcement by assessing and de-escalating crisis situations and connecting individuals to appropriate care based on clinical assessment. The model also emphasizes addressing the social determinants of health that often contribute to crises. This approach enables more efficient use of City resources—allowing officers to return to other calls while clinicians remain on scene to provide follow-up care and stabilization.