Bellevue Hospital’s busy adult psych ward is getting a renovation and 40 additional beds, under an upgrade backed by $25.6 million from the City Council, hospital officials and councilmembers announced Wednesday.
The new funding will bring the total number of adult psychiatric beds up to 204, according to NYC Health and Hospitals, which runs Bellevue. The medical center is the largest provider of inpatient psychiatric care among acute care hospitals in the city. Its adult psychiatric units currently operate at 98% occupancy, officials said.
First-year Councilmember Virginia Maloney, whose district includes Bellevue, said the investment will help ensure that New Yorkers experiencing mental health crises will get care.
“Behind every statistic is a human being experiencing the worst moment of their life who needs the city to provide somewhere for them to go,” Maloney said at a press conference in Bellevue’s atrium. “They deserve a bed. They deserve healthcare.”
Dr. Mitchell Katz, the president and CEO of NYC Health and Hospitals, emphasized the public hospital system's outsize role in caring for New Yorkers with mental health needs.
Katz said the public hospital system provides about 20% of the medical care in the city but 60% of the behavioral health care. He said that’s because inpatient psychiatric care isn’t as lucrative as some other hospital treatments and thus isn’t as big of a priority for the city’s private hospitals.
“If you drive along the West Side, you'll see lots of big signs: ‘Come to us for your cardiac care,’" Katz said. “No one ever says, ‘Come to us for your next psychotic break.’”
In addition to expanding the bed count at Bellevue, the new City Council funds will go toward gut-renovating the hospital’s 12 adult inpatient psych units to create a “more healing environment,” said Dr. Eric Wei, Bellevue’s CEO.
He said some of the units have already been renovated and the City Council funding will help finish the process, which is expected to take about three-and-a-half years to complete.
“We’re going to be taking down the walls, we're going to be taking out the floors, we're going to be changing the windows and then we're going to build a modern, state-of-the-art unit that has a lot more natural light,” Wei said.
He added that the renovations will also help facilitate more recreational and therapeutic programming and will have practical purposes such as creating a better line of sight for staff to keep an eye on patients.
“We've already updated a few of our units, and you can see it's night and day,” Wei said. “You can already feel that it's more healing, that the patients are calmer, the staff have less anxiety.”
The City Council will invest $10.6 million to help complete these renovations in the current fiscal year and another $15 million next year.
