The Adams administration is planning to resign the city’s non-police mental health response team program, or B-HEARD, shifting it from the purview of the FDNY.
Under the changes announced by City Hall, NYC Health + Hospitals, which currently operates the program with FDNY, would entirely run the program. The move drew sharp criticism from the union representing EMTs in the fire department.
“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,” Mayor Adams, who leaves office at the end of the year, said in a statement.
The shift away from a public safety response bears some similarity with the future Mamdani administration’s push to expand the program and change the way the city deals with mental health emergencies. Zohran Mamdani has pledged to put the program under the responsibility of the new Department of Community Safety and hire peer counselors to respond to the mental health crises.
“We remain confident that Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani will implement his full vision for B-HEARD within the Department of Community Safety so we can finally meet our city’s dire mental health crisis head-on and deliver excellent public safety for all New Yorkers,” Mamdani spokesperson Dora Pekec said in response to the announcement.
Katz, who said he’s hoping to stay in his role under Mamdani, emphasized that the new model could make it easier to scale up the program and could help patients find long-term care since the H+H already provides a bulk of mental health services in the city. B-HEARD currently operates in less than half of the city’s 78 police precincts.
The revamped response teams would made up of a nurse, social worker and ambulance driver, instead of EMT responders. EMT workers will be reassigned within FDNY once the transition goes into effect in Spring 2026, said Dr. Mitch Katz, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals.
Katz also said Thursday this new model will help boost FDNY response times, which have steadily grown longer over the past several years.
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