NYU Langone Hospital, Brooklyn, at 150 55th Street in Sunset Park, has opened a Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program, a dedicated unit for people in a mental health crisis that sits right beside the hospital's emergency department. NYU Langone Health announced the opening on October 21, along with a new home for its Brooklyn mobile crisis team across the street.

For families on the southwest Brooklyn waterfront, the change means a psychiatric emergency now has its own space and its own staff at the neighborhood hospital, rather than sharing the general emergency room.

What the new unit holds

The program, known in hospital shorthand as a CPEP, takes up 2,700 square feet next to the emergency department. According to NYU Langone, it has more than a dozen patient care positions, a mix of extended observation beds, individual patient rooms and an open observation area, plus a calming room.

The unit also includes an interview room, a space for group therapy, patient showers and clinical support areas. Its job is assessment, treatment and observation for patients in a psychiatric emergency. Patients who need more care after that can be admitted upstairs to the hospital's 35-bed inpatient psychiatric unit, so a person who arrives in crisis can move from the emergency stage to a longer stay without leaving the building.

Bret J. Rudy, MD, executive vice president and chief of hospital operations at NYU Langone Hospital, Brooklyn, described the unit as a setting built specifically for psychiatric emergency care.

A new base for the mobile crisis team

The second piece of the expansion is across the street. NYU Langone's mobile crisis team, which does most of its work out in the community, now has its own suite in the Augustana building, directly opposite the hospital. The suite has a dedicated workroom and two consultation rooms.

The team travels to people in severe behavioral health crises to assess them and manage the situation in the short term. Patients can also come to the new suite in person for supportive counseling.

Part of a wider buildout in Sunset Park

The emergency unit joins two other recent additions in the same neighborhood. The Augustana Family Health Center at NYU Langone recently opened a behavioral health clinic with 20 individual offices for outpatient mental health care, and NYU Langone expects it to see about 1,200 patients a year.

The Family Health Centers at NYU Langone also run a psychiatry residency based in Sunset Park, a four-year program funded through the federal Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education Program. It recently graduated its first class of three residents. They trained at a federally qualified community health center, did their inpatient training at NYU Langone Hospital, Brooklyn, and rotated through local schools, shelters and NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue.

One of those first graduates, Shiyu Chen, MD, has stayed on with the Family Health Centers as an attending psychiatrist at Sunset Terrace, and is fluent in Mandarin, a language spoken by many families in the neighborhood.

The scale of the work is large. NYU Langone reports that its Family Health Centers handle more than 165,000 mental health visits a year, that behavioral health visits across the network have more than doubled over the past decade, and that its behavioral health services now reach into 36 schools and shelters.

How to get help

In a psychiatric emergency, the entrance is the hospital's emergency department at NYU Langone Hospital, Brooklyn, 150 55th Street, Brooklyn, NY 11220, which now connects to the new unit. Anyone in crisis anywhere in the city can also call or text 988, the national Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, at any hour. For ongoing outpatient care, the behavioral health clinic at the Augustana Family Health Center is part of the Family Health Centers at NYU Langone network.

Sources