October 12, 2023
On Monday, you may have received an invitation from the Governor’s Office requesting your attendance at an event in New York City today where the Governor was to make an announcement related to ‘mental health’. Here’s more on the event from Crain’s New York:
Gov. Kathy Hochul announced on Thursday that the state has placed 200 formerly homeless New Yorkers in secure housing and increased state-run psychiatric hospital capacity as a part of her $1 billion mental health plan passed in the budget this year.
The state’s 11 Safe Options Support teams, which engage with people experiencing street homelessness and coordinate follow-up medical care, made contact with 2,000 people experiencing homelessness since the beginning of this year, Hochul said. Two hundred of those individuals were placed in secure housing.
In August of this year, there were nearly 87,000 homeless people who slept in New York City’s municipal shelter system, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.
The governor also announced that state-funded psychiatric hospitals have opened 99 new inpatient beds—approximately two-thirds of the total number of new beds that the governor pledged to open in her mental health plan. The number of new inpatient psych beds at state-operated facilities will reach her goal of 150 by the beginning of next year, she said.
Hochul said that state officials are “way ahead of schedule” in opening new beds at state-operated psychiatric hospitals, noting that her mental health plan pledged to open 150 beds within a two year-window, and the state will complete that goal in approximately half the time.
In addition to inpatient beds at state-run psychiatric facilities, the state will also restore 500 beds at community hospitals by the new year, the governor said. The beds that will be restored were shut down during the pandemic to create the capacity for additional medical-surgical beds to serve Covid-19 patients.
Housing and inpatient psychiatric bed improvements were funded by Hochul’s $1 billion mental health plan, which was passed in the state budget in May. The plan will also fund new efforts to provide community-based mental health care for New Yorkers and additional housing. State officials will build 900 step-down housing units for individuals after they are discharged from hospitals and emergency rooms, and 1,500 supportive residences for people with serious mental illness.
Inpatient treatment capacity was a focus of Hochul’s mental health plan. In her proposed plan, which was first announced last January, the governor pledged to open or restore around 1,000 inpatient psychiatric beds across the state. Her plan promised to open 150 new state-run beds and direct community hospitals to restore the roughly 850 inpatient psych beds that were taken offline during the pandemic. If hospitals did not comply with this directive, they would be fined $2,000 a day, according to Hochul’s original plan.
The state has committed to reopen 500 inpatient psychiatric beds at community hospitals by the end of this year, but it is unclear when the remaining beds will be reopened. Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokeswoman for the governor, said the timeline to reopen all of the beds that shut down is not set in stone, adding that the administration is still solidifying how hospitals will be penalized.
The enacted state budget included $18 million in capital funding and $30 million in operating funding to increase inpatient treatment capacity.
“We have a moral obligation to care for those struggling with mental illness, but for too long these critical issues have been ignored or left untreated,” Hochul said, adding that she is proud of the progress the state has made on addressing the mental health crisis.
The announcement on the state’s mental health plan comes on the heels of new mental health legislation supported by the governor and Attorney General Letitia James, which aims to protect youth from the harmful behavioral health consequences of social media.