SAN ANTONIO – Changes have come to handle more mental health calls across the city and county.
The two leading mental health units — SA Core and S.M.A.R.T. — have increased their response hours this summer. SA Core is now a 24/7 service in San Antonio, and S.M.A.R.T. covers parts of Bexar County 16 hours a day, seven days a week.
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“We’re able to give them that long-term care and getting those long-term resources that help them out,” Jeffrey Waclawczyk, an SA Core paramedic, said.
SA Core stands for San Antonio Community Outreach and Resiliency Effort. The city’s mental health crisis team comprises SAPD officers, SAFD paramedics and Center for Health Care Services clinicians. When someone calls 911 about a person experiencing a mental health crisis, those calls can be directed to this team.
When the program launched in 2022, the goal was to give San Antonio a multi-dimensional response to mental health calls. Two years later, the number of these calls and this program is growing.
“The need is huge right now, and it’s huge in San Antonio, and it’s huge across the world and the United States,” Danielle, an SA Core clinician, said.
S.M.A.R.T. stands for Bexar County’s Specialized Multidisciplinary Alternate Response Team. It has a similar structure to SA Core, except it is made up of Bexar County Sheriff Deputies, EMS contractors with Southwest Texas Regional Advisory Council (STRAC) and CHCS clinicians.
“We’ve all been conditioned to call 911,” Dr. Andrea Guerrero, the director of public health in Bexar County, said. “But oftentimes the 911 response is not entirely appropriate if you have just a purely law enforcement lens.”
The team covers parts of Bexar County from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m., but Guerrero said the team isn’t far out from a 24-hour service.
“The gap has been really in recruitment and retention of staff,” Guerrero said.
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