The Bellevue Fire Department responded 86 times to Paul (not his real name), a homeless man wrestling with alcoholism and medical issues, before he successfully transitioned off the streets. Almost every time, the department would escort him to Overlake Hospital – and the cycle would begin again.

“We’re good at fixing broken arms and things like that,” says Blaine Singleton, the fire department’s EMS Training Officer. “But there are other things in the environment that we can’t fix by taking someone to the hospital. When somebody makes a frequent call to 9-1-1, the guys on the fire engines take care of the emergent situation and then go back on service and wait for the next call. We don’t get to resolve some of those bigger issues.”

Now a new program, launched in September and inspired by a successful model implemented in Spokane, promises some change. Bellevue Fire Citizen Advocates for Resources and Education Services, or CARES, hopes to reduce the burden of non-emergency 9-1-1 calls by filing reports of repeat callers and following up with them after the fact. Eight months in, the program is seeing promising results.

“When I talked to firefighters, they said [Paul] was tired of it. He wanted something different,” remembers Kathy Barker, Bellevue’s Fire Education Coordinator who later tracked Paul down. “But it was a cycle he couldn’t break.”

Barker remembers his emotional reply when he she first offered to help.

“He started crying and told me: ‘Nobody has ever looked for me or tried to help me before,’” recalls Barker. “What we’re doing, is we’re changing the paradigm for how to deal with this.”

Paul was placed in a transitional housing unit in Seattle and is now receiving help for his alcoholism and medical issues.The program hopes to replicate that outcome across the board.

Non-emergency 9-1-1 calls plague police and fire departments in every city. They can range from an elderly person who’s fallen and can’t get up to a resident mistakenly calling for a prescription refill. First responders can often do little beyond taking an individual to the hospital, or alleviating the immediate issue. But, it’s only a matter of time before an individual calls again.

“If we can put them in line with services that can help them deal with their daily lives – services they had no clue were out there – well, you’d see how excited these people are,” says Singleton.

Once somebody has been identified as a repeat caller, firefighters fill out a brief report documenting the nature of the call and the potential services an individual would need. Later a member of the CARES team follows up in person, leaving contact information if they can’t immediately connect.

“It becomes a natural piece in which everybody is helping each other,” says Denise Serfas, a graduate student of social work at Eastern Washington University, who is interning with CARES as the program gets off the ground.

“The people we’re seeing are the people who have fallen through the cracks,” says Barker. “They’re very complicated cases so it takes a lot of tenacity to make sure we can get them in the right direction. And it’s been eye-opening to see what some people in the community are dealing with, the real lack of resources that are available.”

The benefits are far-reaching. Singleton estimates that each response costs The Bellevue Fire Department $750 so the cost from a repeat caller such as Paul can be considerable. Though there’s no budget for CARES at the moment, the hope is that with time and outreach, it will sustain itself.

“It’s frustrating and scary for people who keep having to call 9-1-1,” says Barker. “When somebody reaches out, proactively to say ‘these are services we’d like to connect you with’…It’s overwhelming to them in a really positive way.”