By Josephine Stratman
New York Daily News
NEW YORK — The Adams administration is planning to resign the city’s non-police mental health response team program, or B-HEARD, shifting it from the purview of the FDNY, City Hall announced Friday.
Under the changes announced by City Hall, NYC Health + Hospitals, which currently operates the program with FDNY, would entirely run the program.
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“This new model for B-HEARD will allow our FDNY EMTs the opportunity to focus further on other emergency response units as part of our city’s efforts to improve ambulance response times and use our resources more efficiently, while still addressing mental health emergencies we continue to see playing out in our city,” Mayor Adams, who leaves office at the end of the year, said in a statement.
The move drew sharp criticism from the union representing EMTs in the fire department.
The shift away from a public safety response bears some similarity with the future Mamdani administration’s push to expand the program and change the way the city deals with mental health emergencies. Zohran Mamdani has pledged to put the program under the responsibility of the new Department of Community Safety and hire peer counselors to respond to the mental health crises.
“We remain confident that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will implement his full vision for B-HEARD within the Department of Community Safety so we can finally meet our city’s dire mental health crisis head-on and deliver excellent public safety for all New Yorkers,” Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said in response to the announcement.
Katz, who said he’s hoping to stay in his role under Mamdani, emphasized that the new model could make it easier to scale up the program and could help patients find long-term care since the H+H already provides a bulk of mental health services in the city. B-HEARD currently operates in less than half of the city’s 78 police precincts.
The revamped response teams would made up of a nurse, social worker and ambulance driver, instead of EMT responders. EMT workers will be reassigned within FDNY once the transition goes into effect in Spring 2026, said Dr. Mitch Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals.
Katz also said Thursday this new model will help boost FDNY response times, which have steadily grown longer over the past several years.
Unions representing EMTs slammed the announcement, with Henry Garrido, executive director of DC37 calling it “shortsighted and unnecessarily rushed.”
“The plan privatizes the ambulance system with hospital contractors instead of simply backfilling the vacant positions perforating our EMS ranks,” he said.
Oren Barzilay, president of Local 2507 which reps EMTs and paramedics, said the move showed “deep disrespect” for the union’s members.
“The men and women of EMS have responded to individuals experiencing mental health crises for the past 50 years and have successfully carried out the work of the B-HEARD program in spite of the limited resources the current administration has given us,” Barzilay said in a statement.
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