San Francisco is closing in on its goal to add 400 new residential treatment beds for people suffering from mental illness and substance-use disorders.
Despite ongoing staffing issues at many care facilities, the city is just 44 beds shy of reaching the expansion goal that its Department of Public Health set in 2021, and now has a total of nearly 2,600 beds, health officials told members of the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee on Wednesday.
“While there are gaps depending on staffing, overall, there is an increase in residential care,” said Hillary Kunins, San Francisco’s director of behavioral health services.
But some supervisors said they were fed up with what they called uneven progress in meeting the city’s dire need for more affordable live-in treatment programs, and argued the city still lacked a comprehensive data collection system for tracking how many people actually use the beds.
“Are we making progress? Are we falling behind? Are we running in place?” Supervisor Rafael Mandelman said at the hearing. “Based on the way we are tracking these numbers, I don’t know whether we have more San Franciscans getting that level of care today than we did five years ago.”