NYU Langone Hospital in Sunset Park has opened a Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program, a dedicated unit for people in a mental health crisis, right next to its emergency department on 55th Street. The health system announced the opening on October 21, along with a new home for its mobile crisis team across the street.

What the unit is

A Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program, or CPEP, is a psychiatric emergency service set up alongside a hospital's ER, so that a person in crisis is seen in a space built for that care. NYU Langone's new unit covers about 2,700 square feet and has more than a dozen patient care positions, including extended observation beds, individual rooms, an observation area and a calming room. It also has an interview room, a group therapy area, patient showers and clinical support space.

Patients who need more care can be admitted to the hospital's 35-bed inpatient psychiatric unit.

A base for the mobile crisis team

The hospital's mobile crisis team, which mostly works out in the community assessing and stabilizing people in severe behavioral health crises, now has its own suite in the Augustana building directly across the street from the hospital. The suite has a workroom and two consultation rooms, and people can come there for supportive counseling.

The Augustana Family Health Center also recently opened a behavioral health clinic with 20 offices for outpatient mental health care, which NYU Langone expects to serve about 1,200 patients a year.

Growing demand, and new local doctors

NYU Langone says its Family Health Centers network logs more than 165,000 mental health visits a year, that behavioral health encounters have more than doubled over the past decade, and that its behavioral health services reach 36 schools and shelters.

The new unit opens as the Sunset Park-based Family Health Centers at NYU Langone Psychiatry Residency graduates its first class of three residents. The four-year program, funded through the federal Teaching Health Center Graduate Medical Education Program, trains residents at a federally qualified health center, with inpatient training at NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn and rotations through schools, shelters and NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue. W. Gordon Frankle, MD, chair of the Department of Psychiatry, helped establish it. One of the first graduates, Shiyu Chen, MD, is staying on as an attending psychiatrist at Sunset Terrace and in NYU Langone's community medicine program, and speaks Mandarin.

Where it is

NYU Langone Hospital in Brooklyn is at 150 55th Street in Sunset Park, and the main number is 718-630-7000. In a mental health emergency, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or call 911.

Sources