19,364 crisis encounters, and where they can't go next

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline) or call San Diego County's Access & Crisis Line at (888) 724-7240, available 24/7.

San Diego County has built one of California's more capable behavioral health crisis response systems. In fiscal year 2024-25, its two field-response programs handled 19,364 encounters: the Mobile Crisis Response Team (MCRT) responded to 10,464 calls, and the Psychiatric Emergency Response Team (PERT) — 70 funded clinician-officer teams across 11 law enforcement agencies — provided 8,900 interventions.

By the county's own published measures, the response side works:

• 98% of MCRT responses met the under-one-hour goal in FY 24-25; the countywide average response time is 24 minutes.
• 49% of MCRT calls were stabilized in the field with no transport at all.
• Only about 12% required transport to a higher level of care such as an emergency department, and fewer than 2% of interventions involved police.
• Since its 2021 inception, MCRT has answered more than 25,000 calls, and its unique-client counts have grown every quarter — 7,350 people by January 2026.

This is what a functioning crisis front end looks like. The question this page documents is what happens after the crisis team leaves.

The connection data

MCRT's dashboards report where clients are connected after stabilization. Across the published 2025-26 series, the connection mix has been remarkably stable: roughly half to outpatient services (48-49%), about a third to crisis stabilization units (34-35%), a single-digit share to hospital care, around 4% to substance use programs.

And every published month shows the same figure for partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs: 0%.

That zero is not a performance failure by the crisis teams. Through the entire published period, adult Medi-Cal PHP/IOP capacity did not exist in San Diego County (part 1 of this series). A connection rate to a level of care with no slots is definitionally zero. The county's 35 newly awarded slots (RFSQ 12892, March 2026) will test whether that number can finally move.

Why the zero matters

Follow the pipeline with the county's own numbers:

1. 19,364 crisis encounters a year (MCRT + PERT, FY 24-25).
2. About a third of MCRT connections go to a crisis stabilization unit — a service capped at 24 hours, billed at $392.43/hour (part 3), which successfully diverts 84% of its clients from hospital admission.
3. From the CSU, the connection options have been: outpatient (typically an hour a week), hospital (the thing the CSU just avoided), or home.

The distance between "an hour a week" and "a locked ward" is exactly the range PHP and IOP exist to cover. A crisis system without them is a highway with an exit ramp that ends in a wall: the 27% same-year rehospitalization rate and the 159 people hospitalized five or more times a year (part 2) are what hitting that wall looks like in the data.

What to watch

Two numbers, both published in the county's regular BHAB materials, will tell San Diego whether the missing middle is starting to function:

• The MCRT connection share for PHP/IOP. It has literally nowhere to go but up from 0%. If it is still zero a year after the RFSQ 12892 programs open, 35 slots were not enough to register.
• The multiple-hospitalization rate. It reached a five-year low (27%) even before step-down capacity existed; if step-down works, this is where it should show.

This page will be updated as new MCRT dashboards and the FY 2025-26 annual report publish.