Mobile Response & Stabilization Services

Mobile Response and Stabilization Services (MRSS) is a crisis intervention model that emphasizes the need to respond to crises with urgency to the immediate needs of children, youth, young adults, and their caregivers. MRSS is part of larger state health reform initiatives and a necessary component of a robust and comprehensive system design. It is comprised of three service components:

• Someone to Contact—the access points for those experiencing a crisis and their caregivers
• Someone to Respond—mobile units that respond to crises in homes
• System to Support—stabilization services for those who need them

Innovations Institute is a national leader in the planning, development, and implementation of MRSS, currently providing technical assistance on MRSS design and implementation, including 988 compliance and coordination, to more than 20 states and communities.

**Our publications and online learning courses on MRSS are provided at right and below.

Experience & Partners

Through the work of our National Technical Assistance Network for Children’s Behavioral Health (TA Network), Innovations developed and hosted six peer policy academies focused on MRSS with 27 states and territories. We created a resource bank on MRSS and issued publications focused on the cost effectiveness of MRSS and essential implementation best practices.

During 2021 and 2022, SAMHSA engaged Innovations to convene a national expert panel focused on the development of a crisis continuum customized to meet the needs of children, youth, young adults, and their families. As part of this work, Innovations facilitated listening sessions with SAMHSA grantees and stakeholder groups including family and youth/young adult leaders and National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors (NASMHPD)’s Children, Youth and Families Division state leadership. Through NASMHPD’s SAMHSA-funded Technical Assistance Coalition and Transformation Transfer Initiative, Innovations provided individualized MRSS consultation to 16 states and territories, and developed, hosted, and provided subject matter expertise for the 2022-2023 MRSS Learning Community (recordings below). With NASMHPD, the Child Health and Development Institute, and Social Current, Innovations launched the two-year 2022-2024 MRSS Quality Learning Collaborative, an in-depth learning opportunity designed for selected states to support MRSS best practice design, installation, and quality improvement. During the spring of 2023, we partnered with Youth Move National to develop a webinar series on collaborating with youth and young adults in the creation of effective crisis response systems: Designing with Youth-Strategies for Building Crisis Response Systems.