New York City Mayor Eric Adams on Friday announced a shift in how the city responds to mental health crisis calls through 911.
The mayor said the Behavioral Health Emergency Assistance Response Division (B-HEARD) will now be operated and managed by NYC Health + Hospitals in the coming months. As part of the transition, Fire Department of the City of New York emergency medical technicians previously assigned to B-HEARD will be reassigned to other emergency response units 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, the mayor said. After the transition, B-HEARD will continue to send out response teams to nonviolent 911 mental health calls with medical and mental health professionals.
“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," Adams said in a statement.
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. 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.
The new model is expected to take effect in the spring of 2026.
