DURHAM, N.C. — A new city program is showing promising data in helping patients, allowing for a potential budget increase for it to expand.

Jessica Laube has years of social work under her belt, but she’s spent the majority of her career focused on crisis response. 

So the fit with Durham’s HEART team was natural. The program talks to patients 

What You Need To Know

  •  HEART helps to offer an alternative to traditional emergency response

  •  Durham's proposed budget would add 27 jobs to the team

  •  Units responded to over 5,000 calls in their first year, but they say they can respond to more

“If there was ever a role, or job, or career that was built for me, it would be this,” Laube said.

Laube says for many of the patients she’s worked with, some form of intervention before police or EMTs are dispatched can make a major difference. 

She says the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams, or HEART program, provide community members with someone who understands them.  

“Just with a different lens, and potentially greater compassion and empathy,” Laube said.

HEART responded to more than 5,000 calls in its first year. 

But director Ryan Smith says that number could have been higher. 

“29,000 calls were eligible for at least one of our responses,” Smith said. “9,300 calls were eligible for community response teams and we responded to over 2,000 of those.”

Smith says he hopes to up those numbers as the city of Durham agrees with those numbers, stating in its recent budget proposal to an increase in funding for the program.

“Looking at the data, the new budget would enable us to [get to] 69-70% that were eligible for HEART.”

Laube says this program has caught the attention of cities across the state, and she believes it’s essential that similar programs exist going forward.

“There have been many times where we’ve been able to potentially de-escalate a situation right then and there and divert an in-person response because a person didn’t necessarily need an in-person response, they just needed someone to talk to for a few minutes,” Laube said. 

Smith says the budget proposal would allow for HEART to add over 20 positions and extend coverage times to 12 hours rather than the current eight, as well as extending outreach to the entire city.