Colorado’s crisis hotline is coming close to or meeting its goal for answering calls in-state after lagging since 2021.
Vibrant Emotional Health, which has a contract to administer the 988 Lifeline, set a goal that in-state call centers will answer 90% of calls. Nationwide back-up centers take calls when no one is available to respond locally, but their employees may not know what resources to direct a caller to in their area.
Vibrant’s monthly reports show Colorado met that goal in January and came close in February and March, when in-state centers picked up 89% of calls. Data from April isn’t yet available.
The state hadn’t hit the goal since at least July 2021, and reached a low of 41% of calls answered locally in August 2024. At the time, the line was in flux, as contractor Rocky Mountain Crisis Partners fought the state’s decision to award the job to a different company.
The new contractor, Arizona-based Solari Crisis and Human Services, took over in September. Solari referred questions about the crisis line to the Colorado Behavioral Health Administration.
The BHA said its data showed Colorado met the goal, with about 92% of calls answered in-state since December. Vibrant’s data includes some calls that never reach the center because the person hangs up quickly, it said.
“Vibrant sets an acceptable level of variance between state data and Vibrant data of up to 5%, and anything within this threshold is considered normal,” the administration’s statement said.
Crisis workers answered about 10 million calls and texts in the first two years after 988 launched nationwide in July 2022. The country previously had a 10-digit suicide prevention hotline, and some states, including Colorado, had their own crisis lines before the easier-to-remember number went live.
Solari answers both the state number and 988 calls placed within Colorado, and the two lines will merge this summer, with calls to the state number redirected to 988.
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