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Kelowna Mayor-elect Tom Dyas, Penticton City Council and outgoing Kamloops Mayor Ken Christian have all called for more police-nurse teams to deal with mental health crises in their cities.

That, for at least two years, has gone nowhere as Interior Health has refused to provide funding for more medical staff for the programs (called Car 40 in Kamloops and PACT – Police and Crisis Teams – in Kelowna).

That doesn’t mean they haven’t stopped trying but a team has now been assembled in Kelowna to look at different, civilian-based, models for dealing with mental health and other issues.

“Over the course of the summer we’ve been working with a group who have been doing literature reviews and making phone calls to models that we think are importable to Kelowna,” Darren Caul, Kelowna’s community safety director told iNFOnews.ca. “These are models that we’ve been looking at across North America. The most oft-cited model is the CAHOOTS model in Eugene, Oregon.”

CAHOOTS stands for Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets and has been in place there for more than 30 years.

Eugene has an estimated 2022 population of close to 180,000 so it’s not much bigger than Kelowna.

Rather that pairing a police officer with a mental health worker, each CAHOOTS van (provided by the city) is staffed with a medic and an experienced crisis worker.

It provided 31 hours of service every day in 2018 at a cost of $798,000 (USD) funded by the city through its police department.

It was dispatched to and arrived at 16,479 calls for service that year.

While it diverts 3-8% of calls from police, it’s more than a crisis response team.

It offers a broad range of other services from counseling and suicide prevention to dealing with substance abuse, grief, non-emergency medical care and mediation.

Following the summer’s research, the City of Kelowna created a Government and Community Action Team that will evaluate the different options before making a presentation to city council.

The effort stems from a key “action item” from the city’s Public Safety Plan adopted by council in April.

The new team has only met once so there won’t be any time to put something into the 2023 city budget, meaning any new program likely won’t be launched next year.

Given the newness of the team and the fact there is a new city council about to be sworn into office, Caul can’t say how long the process might take or what, if any, public consultation will be included.

CAHOOTS is different from the newly expanded Peer Assisted Care Teams in the Lower Mainland that have been led by the Canadian Mental Health Association.

That is more of a response team, at this point, with a medical health professional teamed with a trained peer advisor and is funded by the province on a trial basis.

READ MORE: The business case for removing police from mental health calls in Okanagan, Kamloops

That’s not the model necessarily being pushed by the Canadian Mental Health Association of Kelowna but its CEO, Mike Gawliuk, is working with the city on a model that’s most appropriate for Kelowna.

“Normally the process to get there is significant community consultation to come up with a model that works for the community,” he told iNFOnews.ca. “Kelowna has the (Police And Crisis Team). There’s also mental health crisis response services through Interior Health so it would require community engagement to identify where a peer assisted care team would exist within the existing system – what space it would fill. We can look at filling hours of service where others aren’t available and responding to crises that are lower risk of harm or violence and do so in a way that can effectively de-escalate and destress the situation.”

Kelowna RCMP responded to 3,100 calls last year that had a mental health component. If 3-8% were diverted to a civilian team, that would result in about 90-250 fewer responses by the police.

READ MORE: Kelowna's top cop calls for more mental health resources to help those in crisis

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