Julie Burton

The 2026 State of the State agenda for New York, presented by Governor Kathy Hochul, outlines a comprehensive plan focused on enhancing affordability, ensuring public safety, and expanding opportunities for residents. Key strategic pillars include making life more affordable through initiatives like universal child care and reduced living costs, strengthening public safety and the justice system, investing in critical infrastructure such as housing and clean water, streamlining governmental processes to cut red tape, protecting consumers and workers, fostering innovation and economic development, and supporting student learning, mental health, and online safety. The agenda aims to secure New York's future by addressing current challenges and building a foundation for lasting progress.

The town hall covered various topics including the agency's priorities, new initiatives, and outcomes from the billion-dollar investments from 2023. Discussions included prevention strategies, access to care, and complex specialty care services. The meeting also focused on the importance of integrated, diverse, and equitable care, with emphasis on the involvement of individuals with lived experience and community engagement.

The New York State Office of Mental Health's (OMH) Civil State-Operated Service System's strategic plan focuses on improving the lives of individuals with mental illness through person-centered, recovery-oriented care. Key areas of focus include enhancing clinical services (cognitive remediation, dialectical behavioral therapy, reducing restraints and seclusion), promoting rehabilitation and recovery (recovery-oriented cognitive therapy, peer support, skills development, technology integration), ensuring timely community integration (transitional care planning), treating co-occurring disorders (Transition to Home units, integrated mental health and substance use disorder treatment), and implementing quality and performance monitoring. The plan aims to reduce hospital admissions and long-term stays, increase community integration, and improve overall quality of life for individuals served by the system. Specific objectives include increasing discharges to non-state-operated housing, expanding inpatient treatment capacity, increasing employment and education participation, reducing long stays, and improving engagement in ambulatory services.

The New York State Office of Mental Health's Suicide Prevention Plan outlines strategies to address the public health crisis of suicide. The plan focuses on three key pillars: strengthening foundations for public health suicide prevention approaches, building health system competencies and pathways to care, and improving surveillance methods/tools and access to timely data. Specific initiatives include piloting LOSS Teams, providing suicide prevention trainings, supporting community coalitions, implementing the Zero Suicide model, enhancing data surveillance, and utilizing the 988 crisis line. The plan also addresses the unique needs of at-risk populations such as school-age youth, Black youth, Latina adolescents, LGBTQ youth, veterans, and uniformed personnel, employing a targeted universalism approach to ensure culturally sensitive and effective interventions. The plan aims to reduce suicide rates, improve access to care, and promote mental health and well-being across the state.

The meeting focused on reviewing several projects. Three OMH projects and six Oasis projects were discussed. One OMH project involved establishing a mental health outpatient treatment and rehabilitation program in Westchester County. Another OMH project concerned increasing the capacity of an inpatient psychiatric unit by 20 adult beds at Bronx Care. A third OMH project involved renovating the comprehensive psychiatric emergency department (CPED) intake and triage area at Stony Brook University Hospital. The Oasis projects included a JCAP program capital project in Queens.