That is specifically what the city paid for mental health services.

The health plan provides access to providers.

There's in network providers that are accessed if they want to see someone in person.

It's generally $25 a visit.

There's also virtual visits available through MD Live that are free of charge to the employee.

And then there's of course inpatient care that's covered between 75 and 85%, depending on which plan on which the employees enrolled.

So, so for example, the Betty Ford Foundation, and so if an employee needs um inpatient mental health services, that's another option that's available to them, and this program is generally available at no cost to the employee.

And then finally, um, and the manager spoke about the vision of uh Chief Wright and Chief Elliott was to have an on-staff clinician.

And so in the fall of 2024, the employee clinical wellness program was established.

We hired the first licensed clinician in the fall, and then last summer we hired a second clinician that's part-time, works 30 hours a week, and their services are free to our employees, and they are public safety leaning but but accessible by all employees, um, and those individuals provide counseling, they will uh meet with staff if there's a critical incident, such as like a death of an employee, um, they work with our peer support group for our public safety, um, and they're they're just an employee resource that was an add on about a year and a half ago.

Our peer support team, it's a department resource.

Our peer support team was established back in 1993, and it was a result of an officer-involved shooting that we formed the team.

Uh, the team is made up of both sworn and non-sworn employees of the police department that's specifically trained to obviously do peer support, but also to uh do individual and group debriefings, and they uh also are uh our frontline people as far as making referrals to uh other mental health services.

And we currently have 19 members, which include two of our chaplains, and since the beginning of this year, just to let you know how many contacts we've had, we've had 271 peer contacts from uh those on our department.

So the information we prepared to share with you tonight is on uh the company called Ally Connect.

Ally Connect is an online application that we researched which would provide our employees private access to real-time peer support, licensed therapists, and self-help tools to help them cope with the daily stressors that are associated with police work.

This application can be accessed from an employee's cell phone, from their laptop in the car, or from the computer in their office, and is accessible 24 hours a day.

So several of the following slides are going to contain information that we obtained from Ally Connect that will explain the application in greater detail and highlight the wellness programs and services for first responders.

The company was founded in 2022 by a licensed therapist with extensive experience in military and first responder mental health.

The company currently serves more than 50 agencies across eight states and provides a comprehensive wellness platform designed specifically for first responders.

The purpose of the application is to help tackle one of the biggest challenges we currently face in the law enforcement profession, and that's officer mental health and wellness.

It's designed to support the worthwhile goal of having every first responder in their career as healthy as they started it.

So the company reports a user rate of 16 times higher than traditional employee assistance plans.

They also report an 88% success rate in matching employees with the right therapist, which has resulted in two and a half times longer treatment adherence rate in the long term.

The application will help our officers get assistance faster by matching them with vetted therapists within 24 hours, and the company defines their vetted therapists as culturally competent, meaning they're well versed in the culture demands and experiences specific to law enforcement.

The application includes things such as peer support management, which will create and track internal peer connections and also utilize department data to identify trends, which I'll touch on a little more in the following slide.

So AI-powered technology matches members a digital resource centerapists in minutes and provides access to self-service wellness resources, which is customizable to our specific department as well as putting them in contact with our clinicians here in the city.

So if officers were just wanting to access these resources while they're on duty, maybe they just left a stressful call.

They'd be able to go to the app, it'll be a customizable menu to pick from.

If I'm thinking about stress or anxiety or whatever it is, I might have just cleared from.

Whatever concern they might have, they can access real time on their phone or from their computer.

And it also offers wellness check-ins through its predictive capabilities.

So this will allow us to provide intervention before there's a crisis and build wellness programs based on our officer's specific needs to identify issues early and create plans proactively.

It offers 24-7 clinical support, which can provide guidance to critical incidents real time.

So if we're on some very stressful scene and somebody's maybe having an issue at the moment that with the 24-7 access, we can provide guidance real time.

It also supports our peer support team and Michelle Martin, our city's clinical wellness coordinator, with their decision making and communications, as well as helping us support a post-incident response and department-wide wellness planning.

The company's found that 30% of officers have one or more unaddressed mental wellness conditions that, if left unaddressed, may turn into crisis.

Now, this could be something as simple as just fatigue building up from working the midnight shift, and we rotate shifts every four months.

You go from days to evenings to midnights.

So that will build fatigue, which can lead to stress.

So it isn't always life-threatening critical issues that they're faced with, but just the stressors of the job itself, not only the calls for service that have cumulative stress, but just the rigors of the job and the shift work.

But one of the most attractive features of this application is its ability to integrate with our CAD system, our computer-aided dispatch system.

So what this will do is identify personnel who may be experiencing cumulative stress or exposure to critical incidents that might negatively affect their employee wellness.

So for example, our shifts rotate every four months.

You will likely go from days to four months, evenings to four months, midnights to four months.

So you may have different supervisors in each one of those shifts.

So I may know that Tracy went to a drowning of a child during the day shift.

Now he goes to evening shift, different sergeant.

He then goes to mass shooting or hanging or some horrible event.

And if as you change shifts and chase change sergeants, you may fall through the cracks.

But what this application is designed to do is be fed through our CAD system to know what officers went to what calls, and then be able to predict, hey, this person may need some attention, just a wellness check-in, whether it's with Michelle and her team or our peer support team to just make sure you know they're still on track, everything's okay, that these uh, you know, stressful calls aren't building up on them.

But by identifying those concerns early and providing proactive resources, the tool has the potential to reduce poor field decisions by officers, lower community complaints, decrease our use of force incidents, reduce risk to fellow officers, lower PTSD related disability claims, prevent uh prevent domestic violence and uh most importantly prevent suicides.

So after consultation with the city's purchasing department and the city attorney's office, we began a trial of the product on March 26 of this year, and although the trial didn't include the CAD integration, which is very important, the participation and engagement levels have already demonstrated significant value.

The pilot was only offered to our sworn officers and dispatch personnel, which total about 400 personnel, give or take.

And out of that, 216 voluntary participants engaged with the program, and we've had over 363 completed wellness check-ins.

So you may ask how come only 216 people participated, but you had 363 wellness check-ins.

You can just keep revisiting the site, accessing resources, answering the questions differently, like are you not sleeping well because you're on midnights?

Yes.

Well, now you're on days.

Okay, I'll change my answer to that question.