At King County, we envision a behavioral health system that is connected, accessible, culturally responsive, and capable of meeting the growing need for care. Last week, King County and Pioneer Human Services announced the opening of a new residential treatment facility in King County. The 16-bed program will begin accepting patients on Monday, September 23, and will serve Medicaid-eligible adults who are experiencing co-occurring mental health conditions and substance use disorders. This is big news because for years the region has lost residential treatment beds. King County is helping bring them back.
The people who will come through these doors can be people referred by a variety of behavioral health providers, outreach or social workers, as well as people who have interacted with the criminal legal system.
For the opening, King County Executive Dow Constantine joined Pioneer Human Services, Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, and Susan McLaughlin, Director of the King County Department of Community and Human Services Behavioral Health and Recovery Division to see the facility.
The Residential Treatment Program will be staffed by an interdisciplinary team that can provide a comprehensive range of services to support recovery. The team will include licensed clinicians, peer support, medical and psychiatric providers, housing and employment specialists, and other paraprofessionals. Services include medications for opioid use disorder, psychiatric assessment and ongoing medication management, motivational interviewing, and other evidence-based practices. Patients at the program will also be connected with ongoing community-based treatment, housing, and employment as they transition back into life in the community.
King County Executive Dow Constantine said, “When a person’s substance use or mental health reaches a crisis point, it can also be a turning point toward support and recovery – but only if the right treatment is available. These 16 new beds will help over 300 people each year, marking real progress toward our goal of adding 115 residential beds to our behavioral health system. It’s a key part of King County’s comprehensive approach to defeating the overdose crisis and expanding access to behavioral health care, because treatment works and recovery is possible – when people receive the care they need, when they need it.”
Susan Mclaughlin, King County Behavioral Health and Recovery Division Director, said, ““Today we are not just opening one door, but opening opportunity for more than 300 people per year to get the specialized care they need to be healthy and well right here in King County. Every day, people are accessing treatment, in higher numbers than ever before, and King County is rising to meet that demand.”
Earlier this year, King County Executive Dow Constantine announced a multi-part strategy across five priority areas to address the surge of fentanyl and stop overdose deaths in the region. DCHS provided a progress update on the strategy in June. The strategies expand behavioral health treatment, increase access to medications for opioid use disorder, and make overdose prevention tools and resources more widely available. In that announcement, opening this 16-bed residential facility for co-occurring conditions was identified as one of King County’s key actions. Now, the facility will begin accepting patients.
See more progress on all of King County’s 13 Actions to Stop Overdoses and Clear Paths to Recovery for All in the first six months of 2024.*
- Launch a 24/7 Buprenorphine Prescribing Line.
- Anyone 13 years and older can now call 206-289-0287 to talk to a physician and get a prescription for Buprenorphine, a medication to treat opiate use. In the first six months of 2024, participating doctors wrote 232 prescriptions.
- Enable 40+ existing behavioral health providers to begin providing Buprenorphine induction and ongoing treatment through Medicaid funding.
- Currently 24 community walk-in clinics offer Buprenorphine induction in office today and 14 providers in our King County network offer buprenorphine.
- Increase the capacity of 24/7 youth mobile crisis teams in the field from 3 to 5, and 24/7 adult mobile crisis teams from 17 to 27 teams countywide.
- At existing capacity, mobile crisis teams conducted over 1,700 outreaches (358 for youth, and 1,421 for adults) since the beginning of the year. Additional behavioral health outreach teams, including Emergency Services Patrol, Sound and Metro, and Recovery Navigators, made another 34,000 contacts helping people in community.
- Invest in 6 new community navigators for public safety, health care, and community settings, to link people at risk of overdose to treatment and support harm reduction.
- Public Health’s RFP for the 6 new community navigators is complete. The navigators will be trained up and in place this year.
- Open a 16-bed residential treatment program with Pioneer Human Services for people with co-occurring disorders (mental health and substance use) in Seattle.
- The renovated facility is ready and will begin accepting patients by the end of September. So far this year, we’ve assisted 1,170 people in accessing substance use disorder residential treatment.
- Partner with the City of Seattle to site and re-open a 24/7 sobering center that provides an essential health-supervised care setting.
- A site for the new center was identified. The current sobering center served 929 people so far in 2024.
- Partner with the City of Seattle, Downtown Emergency Service Center (DESC) and University of Washington to open a post-overdose recovery center.
- DESC will operate the site in Downtown Seattle at the Morrison Hotel building on Third Avenue. Renovations will begin this year with capital funding from DCHS. The facility will open in 2025.
- Expand the number of King County fire departments that leave-behind naloxone at sites of overdoses where people are at high risk.
- The 8 fire departments in King County that showed interest have them in stock today. We will be adding more as interest grows.
- Convene a county-wide Overdose Fatality Review process to review overdose fatalities and develop recommendations for policy changes to reduce overdose deaths.
- The Overdose Fatality Review process launched and is convening regular meetings.
- Test up to 1,000 drug samples annually, to reduce accidental drug poisonings, through expanding drug checking services in King County-based services.
- In Q1 and Q2 2024, Public Health scaled up three drug checking services and a mobile testing unit, testing more than 450 samples so far.
- Distribute 45,000 naloxone kits and 100,000 test strips, a 15 percent increase from 2023, through a new centralized harm reduction supply center and vending machines.
- In Q1 and Q2 2024, Public Health distributed more than 115,000 naloxone kits, 63,353 test strips and stood up three new vending machines (so far).
- Add ~100 new apprenticeships statewide with half of the opportunities in King County. Apprenticeships range from behavioral health technicians, substance use disorder professionals, and peer counselors.
- Read about the apprenticeship program here, expanded this year with funding from the Crisis Care Centers Initiative.
- Distribute $2 million in overdose prevention grants from opioid settlement funds to disproportionately impacted underserved populations. Populations with high overdose rates include Black, Indigenous and communities of color, and people living unsheltered.
*all data represents numbers for Q1 and Q2 2024.