NYC Health + Hospitals Announces Second Year of Achievements Under the Behavioral Health Blueprint

NYC Health + Hospitals Announces Second Year of Achievements Under the Behavioral Health Blueprint

Mar 03, 2026

New York, NY — NYC Health + Hospitals today announced the accomplishments of the second year of its comprehensive three-year plan to strengthen and expand its behavioral health services. The 2025 Behavioral Health Annual Progress Report details the advancement of initiatives to build capacity and resilience into the city’s behavioral health workforce and services. Specifically, the report tracks progress in 2025 across the blueprint’s six core strategies: restoring and maximizing inpatient capacity; expanding access to outpatient services; increasing services to special populations; enhancing social work, care management, and peer services; preventing violence and increasing safety; and building the behavioral health workforce. This progress is due in part to philanthropic investment, which has enabled the health care system to launch and expand innovative clinical programs while strengthening recruitment, retention, and career advancement across behavioral health service lines and expand access timely, high-quality behavioral health care.

Today’s announcement builds upon the three-year plan announced in 2024, the Behavioral Health Blueprint: Turning Crisis into Opportunity, and adds to the track record of accomplishments detailed in the 2024 Behavioral Health Annual Progress Report. NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest provider of behavioral health care in New York City. The health care system provides almost 60% of behavioral health services citywide, has a behavioral health workforce of about 5,700 employees, and serves over 82,000 patients annually across emergency, inpatient, and outpatient care.

“Our accomplishments reflect that excellence in behavioral health care is at the heart of NYC Health + Hospitals’ mission as we serve all New Yorkers, without exception,” said NYC Health + Hospitals System Chief of Behavioral Health Services Omar Fattal, MD, MPH.“At a pivotal moment for behavioral health in our city and our country, we are proud to advance our strategic vision. We are strengthening our commitment to delivering outstanding behavioral health services across the full continuum of care, including serving the majority of New Yorkers with complex behavioral health needs. This progress report highlights the actions we have taken to move that work forward a second year in a row under our behavioral health blueprint.”

In 2025, NYC Health + Hospitals delivered the following accomplishments from its Behavioral Health Blueprint:

Increased Inpatient Capacity

• Maintained an average of approximately 1,090 inpatient psychiatric beds online and available, with an average daily census of 950 patients.
• Launched the Behavioral Health Transfer Unit, streamlining transfers of adult, child and adolescent patients within the system. As of December 2025, the Behavioral Health Transfer Center had successfully completed more than 600 patient transfers, ensuring New Yorkers awaiting psychiatric inpatient admission received the inpatient care they needed as soon as possible.

Expanded Outpatient Access

• Improved access to outpatient behavioral health services: in 2025, overall scheduled visits with behavioral health providers increased by 12% and completed visits with individual patients increased by 9% compared to 2024. 
• Maintained high patient satisfaction regarding access to outpatient behavioral health services: 89% of patients reported they felt satisfied with the behavioral health care they received from NYC Health + Hospitals, and 88% of patients indicated they would likely recommend these services to others. 

Increased Services for Special Populations: Special populations include individuals with co-occurring substance use disorders, as well as those with intellectual or developmental disabilities; people experiencing homelessness; and children and adolescents.

• Announced Track to Treatment, a program that will provide enhanced support to individuals who present to the Psychiatric Emergency Department with a substance use issue. The initial focus of this program will be individuals with a substance use disorder who are removed from the community to a hospital under Section 9.58 of New York State Mental Hygiene Law. The program This program embeds NYC Health + Hospitals social workers and psychiatrists in the city’s domestic violence shelters. access to long-acting medications for opioid and alcohol use disorder, and introduce Contingency Management to reinforce engagement during the bridge phase. Contingency Management includes small rewards for patients, which are directly tied to the achievement of predetermined patient-centered goals. This initiative is supported by $5.1 million in City funding.
• Launched Hotspotting, an innovative pilot program to reduce opioid overdose deaths, nonfatal overdoses, and use of the emergency department. This program successfully launched at NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln in July 2024, and engaged more than 150 patients in the Emergency Department during the first five months of operation.
• Implemented NYC Health + Hospitals’ Emergency Department Opioid Use Disorder Simulation Training to strengthen how Emergency Department prescribers engage with patients living with opioid use disorder and those at risk of opioid overdose. Since launch in 2024, 350 Emergency Department prescribers have completed this training.
• Expanded Caring Transitions, a suicide prevention and intervention program for youth supported by $2.4 million from the NYC Department of Health, to cover all three acute facilities in the Bronx: NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi, Lincoln, and North Central Bronx, after launching at Elmhurst and Queens hospitals in 2024. Since launch, Caring Transitions has served nearly 150 youth.
• Expanded the Child Emergency Department Telepsychiatry Consults service to three facilities, NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem, Lincoln, and Woodhull, ensuring that children experiencing acute mental health crises receive timely psychiatric evaluations and interventions.
• Standardized and expanded the Child Crisis Intervention Specialists program with State funding, ensuring stronger connections to outpatient services for children in need. To improve crisis response across the system, Child Crisis Intervention Specialists have been integrated into all 11 acute care facilities. These specialists assist in assessing children and adolescents presenting in crisis to Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Programs (CPEPs), Emergency Departments, and outpatient care settings.
• Announced that beginning in Spring 2026, B-HEARD will transition to being fully operated by NYC Health + Hospitals. This shift will streamline program management while continuing to provide a health-first response to 911 mental health emergencies, aiming to keep individuals out of emergency rooms and hospitals and avoid unnecessary police contact whenever possible.
• Expanded the Domestic Violence Shelter Mental Health Initiative, which embeds NYC Health + Hospitals social workers and psychiatrists in the city’s domestic violence shelters, to 41 shelters across four boroughs, successfully providing over 9,800 behavioral health appointments and serving over 1,200 clients. Additionally, over 400 staff members in the city’s domestic violence shelters have been trained annually on topics related to mental health and trauma.
• Opened Bridge to Home, a new, innovative support model for patients with severe mental illness who are ready to be discharged from the hospital but do not have a place to go. The Bridge to Home program aims to fill this critical gap between inpatient treatment and permanent housing placement, offering patients a stable, home-like environment with onsite clinical services and behavioral health care to ensure they can continue their recovery while transitioning to permanent housing.

Enhanced Social Work, Care Management, and Peer Services

• Received a Silver Award for Purpose-Led Campaign of the Year from Modern Healthcare and Ad Age for its social worker recruitment campaign, Social Workers Needed Here. The campaign enabled NYC Health + Hospitals to attract and hire more than 400 new social workers to serve New Yorkers in need, bringing the health care system’s social work vacancy rate down from 12% in 2024 to 5% in 2025.
• Implemented the Social Work Clinical Licensure Training Program, which provides Licensed Master Social Workers (LMSWs) at NYC Health + Hospitals with training and financial support to attain their clinical licensure in exchange for a two-year commitment to the health care system. This program has supported the career mobility of more than 80 incumbent LMSW staff since launch. 
• Launched a Community Health Worker–led Complex Care Management pilot in August 2025, integrating Community Health Workers into outpatient behavioral health care to support high-need patients between visits, improve engagement, address social needs, and prevent symptom escalation. 
• Launched new Critical Time Intervention teams, serving adults who have had multiple psychiatric hospital or emergency visits within the last year and provide follow-up care for up to nine months after they are discharged. Funded by the New York State Office of Mental Health, the $32.2 million teams are supported for five years. Critical Time Intervention teams are currently available at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, Jacobi, Kings County, Metropolitan, and Queens and are projected to serve up to 650 patients a year.
• Employed over 100 peer counselors across the system as of 2025, and continued to be one of the largest employers of peers in New York City. Nearly 70% of Peer Academy graduates are hired within 12 months or less, and nearly 50% of the peer counselors at NYC Health + Hospitals are graduates from the Peer Academy. 
• Implemented the Peer Bridger program, which pairs patients discharged from a Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program (CPEP) with certified Peer Counselors to provide support for up to several months after they leave the hospital. The Peer Bridger program is available at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, Elmhurst, Harlem, Jacobi, Kings County, North Central Bronx, Queens, and Woodhull.
• Implemented Expanded Crisis Follow-up Services, which offers immediate proactive, preventative, and stabilizing mental health support services for complex acute patients discharged from the CPEP. These services facilitate linkage to care and reduce repeated emergency department visits or hospitalization. Crisis Follow-up Services are currently available at NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, Elmhurst, Kings County, and Queens hospitals with plans to expand to Jacobi, Woodhull, and Harlem hospitals. 

Prevented Violence and Increased Safety

• Provided advanced training to 800 NYC Health + Hospitals staff members system-wide in core violence-prevention interventions, including screening and assessment of high-risk patients, trauma-informed de-escalation techniques, and the role of violence prevention in advancing a culture of safety. Additionally, the violence screening rates in psychiatric emergency departments/CPEPs steadily increased over 2025, from 61% in the first quarter to 74% in the last quarter of the year.

• Launched a simulation-based violence-prevention training program, which is on-track to train 500 participants within its first year of implementation. Preliminary analyses indicate staff who completed the training reported a significant increase in confidence and competence in de-escalation skills, reinforcing the program’s alignment with established best practices.

Developed the Health System’s Workforce

• Announced NYC Health + Hospitals’ lowest behavioral health staff turnover and vacancy rates in recent history following a suite of programs focused on recruitment, retention, training, and expanded career pathways. The health care system’s behavioral health staff turnover rate is now at 8%, a significant drop from nearly 18% in 2022 and far below the national average of 31%. Additionally, vacancies across all behavioral health disciplines declined to 6%, below the national average of 14%. Vacancies for social workers fell from 12% in 2024 to 5% in 2025. In addition, vacancies for psychiatric nurse practitioners, psychologists, and behavioral health associates each fell by over 50%.
• Awarded over $6 million in student debt relief to 200 clinicians since launching the BH4NYC Loan Repayment Program in 2023. The health care system provided these awards in exchange for a three-year service commitment, serving over 110,000 patient visits annually.
• Launched the 2025 PSYCH DOCS 4 NYC campaign to recruit psychiatrists and psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners to work at NYC Health + Hospitals. This campaign yielded over 75,000 clicks on the job applicant landing page.

• Launched the Behavioral Health Nursing Career Ladder program to provide staff with educational support and financial assistance to enroll in nursing schooling exchange for a three-year commitment to NYC Health + Hospitals.
• Welcomed the first cohort of seven Psychiatric Physician Assistant Fellows for a 12-month fellowship that combines clinical work, didactics, mentorship, psycho-pharm course, and a capstone project.

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MEDIA CONTACT: PressOffice@nychhc.org

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About NYC Health + Hospitals
NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest municipal health care system in the nation serving more than a million New Yorkers annually in more than 70 patient care locations across the city’s five boroughs. A robust network of outpatient, neighborhood-based primary and specialty care centers anchors care coordination with the system’s trauma centers, nursing homes, post-acute care centers, home care agency, and MetroPlusHealth—all supported by 11 essential hospitals. Its diverse workforce of more than 46,000 employees is uniquely focused on empowering New Yorkers, without exception, to live the healthiest life possible. For more information, visit www.nychealthandhospitals.org and stay connected on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.