NEWYORK: New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a major evolution of behavioral health emergency assistance response division (B-HEARD) — the city’s health-led response to 911 mental health calls — that will shift the focus even further towards a health-first response by streamlining management to be fully operated and managed by NYC Health + Hospitals in the coming months.
As part of the transition, Fire Department of the City of New York (FDNY) emergency medical technicians (EMTs) previously assigned to B-HEARD will be reassigned to other emergency response units as part of the city’s efforts to improve ambulance response times in cases of emergencies.
This change will preserve EMTs for the most critical medical emergency responses while enabling B-HEARD to continue featuring medical and mental health professionals for nonviolent mental health 911 calls.
After the transition, B-HEARD will continue to send out response teams to nonviolent 911 mental health calls with medical and mental health professionals. The new model is expected to take effect in the spring of 2026.
The announcement further builds on Mayor Adams’ commitment to supporting New Yorkers with serious mental illness and treating the city’s mental health crisis as a public health issue.
“Today, we are proud to announce a new model for our city’s response to 911 mental health calls that will be fully operated by NYC Health + Hospitals ,” said Mayor Adams.
“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. From day one, our administration’s goal has been to keep New Yorkers safe and to help those struggling with severe mental illness; doing this means we must provide treatment and support to those in crises in the most efficient and compassionate way possible. We are building a culture of compassion in the name of public safety, public health, and the public interest, and we are proud to be delivering just that.”
“NYC Health + Hospitals is proud to be the largest provider of behavioral health services in New York City, and our commitment to the city’s innovative B-HEARD program is unwavering,” said NYC Health + Hospitals President and CEO Mitchell Katz, MD.
“We are grateful to our outstanding partners in the program’s first iteration, and we look forward to continuing its evolution as we serve New Yorkers in mental health crisis.”
Launched in 2021, B-HEARD was created as an interagency collaboration between the FDNY and NYC Health + Hospitals with oversight from the Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health (OCMH). During its initial years of operation, B-HEARD partnered EMTs and mental health clinicians to respond as a team to 911 mental health calls without violence or weapons as the primary concern.
Over the life of the program — between its launch in 2021 through June 2025 — B-HEARD teams have responded to nearly 35,000 mental health 911 calls.
Of the patients who received a mental health assessment by a NYC Health + Hospitals clinician, 43 percent were served in the community instead of being transported to a hospital emergency department. B-HEARD teams work to understand each individual’s needs, de-escalate situations, and, whenever possible, connect with family members and the individual’s existing clinicians to determine the best path forward.
The program achieved an overwhelming patient-satisfaction rate with 96 percent of survey respondents reporting B-HEARD helped them and 94 percent agreeing that the B-HEARD response was more appropriate for their needs than the traditional emergency response they had previously received.
Each B-HEARD response reflects New York City’s commitment to responding to the mental health crisis with the most appropriate care and reducing unnecessary use of a hospital’s emergency department and of police resources.
NYC Health + Hospitals is the largest provider of behavioral health in New York City.
The system provides over 60 percent of behavioral health services citywide, serving over 78,000 patients annually across emergency, inpatient, and outpatient care.
