CM Brewer on correctional health staffing and NYC Care enrollment

Okay, great.

Councilmember Brewer.

Thank you very much.

On correctional health, I have a question.

on New York Cares bike crashes, because you know more about it, and then just mental health on the street.

So correctional health, congratulations finally.

I understand there's 96 people.

When Stanley Richards was here the other day, he said it was 96, which is phenomenal.

It's 95 today.

95 today.

Congratulations.

And so that's going well.

But then at Rikers or other locations, I don't know, what's the cost, where it's a budget hearing, what else do you need?

It's still challenging on Rikers as opposed to at Bellevue.

And I'm just wondering if you could update us on the cost, update us on any other needs that you might have in terms of correctional health.

Yeah, I appreciate so much the additional funding, which is going to make correctional health services whole again.

And that really covers the increase in cost for pharmaceuticals.

As Dr.

Katz noted, we have more patients and we have sicker patients.

And that's really the issue there.

And it will allow us to make up for the salaries for the people who are good providers and providing the kind of services that we expect them to provide.

The outposted project continues.

They are funded.

We are working very closely with the Department of Correction under Commissioner Richards.

It's wonderful.

And with the State Commission on Correction to finalize the design.

For the Bronx and the Brooklyn sites.

Okay.

Really excited about it.

Fantastic.

The issue to those at Rikers, how much staff is there?

Is it every day?

When I'm there, and I'm there pretty often, it never seems like there's a lot of folks in the clinic, but that's just because maybe I'm there at the wrong time.

I got it.

But it's not hard to recruit.

I'm just trying to get a sense because people get sick, obviously, and I was just trying to understand if that is still an issue or you think you're totally copacetic with correctional health at Rikers.

We can always do better, and it is a challenging place to work.

We have been much more successful in recent years, certainly since COVID, in recruiting and retaining staff.

Our vacancy rate is about 8% at this point in time.

Part of the reason why we needed to come to you for the budget leveling is because we've basically run out of vacancy money, dollars that were not spent because of vacancies because we've reduced that.

Which is a good thing.

We have staff on.

All right.

I live with people who are asylum seekers and they love New York Cares.

I'm not sure they use it very much, but they know about it.

So I'm just wondering, what's the cost?

Are you increasing those who are participating, et cetera?

Just get a sense of it.

Sure.

Well, remember when NYC Cares was funded, basically it was a single funding which covers our having an 800 number, an additional fund.

pharmaceuticals, and the infrastructure to run the program.

But the program really just takes advantage of health and hospitals.

We don't cap the number, right?

We've always taken care of everybody, regardless of their immigration status.

The difference is there was never an organized system to enable people to know how to do it or to get a primary care appointment in two weeks and have that be the center of it.

So I'm sure the actual costs exceed the amount of money that the city is giving, but that's okay.

These are people we've always wanted to take care of.

So how many people are taking it?

130,000.

130,000, okay.

And that's pretty steady?

It's about 10,000 higher than it was this time last year.

Congratulations.