Police-mental health co-response versus police-as-usual response to behavioral health emergencies: A pragmatic randomized effectiveness trial.

Background: People with mental illness are overrepresented in United States (US) criminal legal systems. In response, alternatives to traditional police response to behavioral health emergencies have become more common, despite limited evidence for their effectiveness. We conducted the first randomized controlled trial of a police-mental health co-response team to determine program effectiveness relative to a police-as-usual response on key outcomes identified by community stakeholders.

Individual and county-level variation in outcomes following non-fatal opioid-involved overdose.

Background: A lack of large-scale, individually linked data often has impeded efforts to disentangle individual-level variability in outcomes from area-level variability in studies of many diseases and conditions. This study investigated individual and county-level variability in outcomes following non-fatal overdose in a state-wide cohort of opioid overdose patients.

Methods: Participants were 24 031 patients treated by emergency medical services or an emergency department for opioid-involved overdose in Indiana between 2014 and 2017.