Courtenay Weighs Extra Funding for Mobile Crisis Team After Mental Health Call Share Triples

**TL;DR** Mental health calls now make up 10% of all crisis calls in Courtenay, up from 3% previously. The city is reviewing whether to allocate more funds to the Mobile Integrated Crisis Response (MICR) team after its first six months showed a near‑90% rise in daily patient contacts while emergency department visits stayed flat.

**Context** The MICR launched in September 2025 as a partnership between Comox Valley RCMP and Island Health, pairing a mental‑health‑trained officer with a psychiatric nurse. Inspector Scott Mercer noted that April 2025 RCMP town halls flagged mental health as a prevalent community issue and a focus of concern. The team’s goal is to meet people in crisis before they reach the emergency department and to connect them with ongoing community services.

**Key Facts** - Call volume and workload for mental‑health crisis calls increased from 3% to 10% of total crisis calls (Fact 1). - Lesley Howie reported that MICR boosted daily patient encounters by almost 90% over six months, while emergency presentations remained stable (Fact 3). - From September 2024 to April 2025 the program logged 912 crisis encounters; from September 2025 to April 2026 it recorded over 1,000 encounters, including about 500 directly handled by MICR.

**What It Means** The rise in call share suggests growing demand for mental‑health response, but the MICR data indicate the team is reaching more people in the community without increasing emergency department load. Because the encounter increase is observational, it shows correlation, not causation, between MICR deployment and higher community contacts. Practical takeaway: expanding MICR could improve early engagement for individuals not yet linked to services, though further study—such as a controlled cohort—would clarify impact on hospital admissions and officer time.

Watch for the city’s budget decision later this quarter, which will determine whether MICR receives additional staffing or resources to sustain its expanded reach.