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Committee approves forwarding $300,000 RWJF grant to evaluate San Francisco Street Crisis Response Team
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Summary
The committee voted to send a resolution to the full Board to retroactively accept a $300,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to evaluate the Street Crisis Response Team, an SCRT pilot that dispatches behavioral health clinicians paired with paramedics and peer specialists from 911 to divert crises from police.
The Budget & Finance Committee on Feb. 17 voted to forward to the full Board a resolution authorizing the Department of Public Health to accept and expend a $300,000 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant to evaluate San Francisco’s Street Crisis Response Team (SCRT).
Dr. Matthew Goldman, medical director for comprehensive crisis services at San Francisco DPH, presented the award and the planned evaluation. He said the SCRT pairs a behavioral health clinician, a San Francisco Fire Department paramedic and a peer specialist and is dispatched through 911 to provide assessment, deescalation and triage of adults experiencing mental health and substance use crises. Dr. Goldman described the evaluation as an 18‑month interrupted time‑series design that will use electronic health records and care‑management data to assess linkage to outpatient treatment, crisis‑service reutilization and housing‑placement outcomes; the study will include analyses stratified by race and qualitative interviews to identify facilitators and barriers.
Dr. Goldman summarized population data as context for the program: of the roughly 17,695 people identified as homeless in fiscal year 2018–19, 67.5% had mental health or substance‑use diagnoses, and 30.9% (about 3,930 individuals) were identified as extremely high risk with psychotic disorder plus a substance‑related diagnosis. “We submitted an application for a rigorous evaluation … and our proposal … was one of nine selected for funding,” he said, and requested retroactive approval because the award letter had an earlier project start date.
The committee moved the resolution to the full Board with a positive recommendation.
Next steps: The evaluation will run through mid‑2022 and the committee asked staff to coordinate on reporting expectations and timelines with the Board.
