Northwell Health will grow its inpatient psychiatric capacity on Long Island by 28 beds and upgrade facilities for people in its care.
The expansion was announced this week by Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office, which outlined $6.6 million in funding for Northwell psychiatric facilities on Long Island and in Queens, part of a package that will also benefit facilities in New York City and the Finger Lakes region.
Northwell will put $5.6 million toward a new 24-bed adolescent inpatient psychiatric unit at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park and four beds at Amityville’s South Oaks Hospital for adolescents with mental illness and substance use disorders. About $1 million more will go toward improving recreational facilities at South Oaks and Port Jefferson’s Mather Hospital, a community hospital with behavioral health services for children and adults.
“We want them off the screens, we want them doing stuff that’s physical, we want them interacting,” said Dr. John Young, Northwell’s senior vice president for behavioral health.
The funding extends a $2 billion state effort, begun in 2023, to confront a mental health crisis exacerbated by the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic with investments that include psychiatric emergency programs and new beds in state psychiatric hospitals. A 2024 state comptroller’s report found from 2014 to 2023 Long Island lost 47 psychiatric care beds in Nassau and 129 in Suffolk.
“The trend nationally, in the city and on Long Island, has been that health systems are contracting and closing behavioral health units because the reimbursements are not good and they lose money,” Young said. In contrast, he said, Northwell is investing more in psychiatric care and now supports more beds for inpatient psychiatric care than it did a decade ago, he said. The system has 455 state-licensed psychiatric care beds on Long Island.
In the last year, Northwell, the largest hospital system on Long Island, opened or expanded facilities offering child and adolescent psychiatric care in Riverhead, Melville and at Mather. It also operates school-based mental health with 65 Long Island districts. Young said those were “upstream” investments to offer care before a person’s problems become acute enough to require hospitalization.
Advocates said the awards were welcome but more investment was needed.
“Are these beds enough? Based on way we currently care for people, no, they’re not,” said Liz Hildebrandt, executive director of NAMI Queens/Nassau, a grassroots mental health organization. “There is still a huge percentage of people who will be released from the hospital way too soon and will end up on the streets of Hempstead, Riverhead or New York City.” Those people are no longer in the mental health crisis that led to hospitalization but may not follow a prescribed treatment plan to ensure long-term health, she said.
In a Friday news release about the state’s mental health investments, Hochul’s office highlighted the work of the Office of Hospital Care and Community Transitions. It was created last year to help hospitals find gaps in service, along with teams of specialists to work with people at risk of being readmitted for emergency treatment. The state also is expanding engagement teams intended to support people who have difficulty connecting with traditional forms of mental health care, some of which work on Long Island.
Jeffrey Reynolds, CEO of Garden City-based Family & Children’s Association, a nonprofit that provides mental health and other services, wrote in an email that the funding was “a recognition that young people on Long Island and across New York State are still in the midst of a mental health crisis, which has become intrinsically intertwined with the opioid crisis as young people look for ways to soothe their anxiety, depression and other challenges.”
Additional Investments in community-based services and residential care “are absolutely vital,” he wrote.
The 2024 report from state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found that the number of people served by the state’s public mental health system had risen 23% over the last decade, with cases of severe mental illness on the rise even as the number of beds in state operated psychiatric centers steadily declined.
Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.