Narcisse asks about expanding Pride Health access in Staten Island and Queens

Pride Health Centers.

The four Pride Health Centers are primarily located in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Brooklyn.

For TGNB, New Yorkers in Staten Island or out of Queens,

distance can be a meaningful barrier, particularly now that same private hospitals programs have pulled back.

Are there any plans to expand access points even for mental health services specifically in those boroughs?

Great.

So I can start and then I'll pass it back to Dr.

Fattal.

And thank you for that question.

I would say the last time I was sitting in this room was during the COVID pandemic, giving testimony.

And if we were to look back historically, I'm a kind of a glass half full kind of guy, that one of the positives that came out of the pandemic

was our ability to turn on telehealth or virtual care literally overnight in the midst of the pandemic.

And one of the things, again, that I'm very proud of New York City Health and Hospitals is our continuation of those services to, as I said before, reach New Yorkers where they want to be met.

We have relied very much on telehealth or virtual care to reach patients throughout all five boroughs in the city.

Now, to your question, I would say we continuously monitor.

The need or the demand for clinical services throughout our system and indeed we work as a system right so i want to be very clear that a system works in that not all services are available

at each and every center but as a system we work together so if i'm seeing patients at bellevue and i don't have a particular service there i can refer that patient

to one of our other facilities.

And telehealth is absolutely a tool for convenience.

And I would say, and I was going to turn it over to you, Amar, but certainly in the behavioral health realm lends itself very nicely to that exact type of care.

So maybe if you have additional comment.

Yeah, 100%.

This is one of the few things that the good things that came out of COVID is really transformed the way we deliver care.

We've actually published studies on this from H&H where we saw higher show rates for people who are using telehealth.

So we very much use that.

And as Dr.

Wallach mentioned, in behavioral health, if you think about it, most of what we do is based on talk therapy, and we don't really need to touch a person or do a physical exam.

So it lends itself very nicely to telehealth.

And Chairman and Nurses, if I may, just to say we offer a Pride Center at Lincoln, Bellevue, Woodhull, Metropolitan, Elmhurst, and Jacoby.

In addition, there are two additional sites as well.

So it's not just four sites within our system.

Gotham Health, both Gouverneur and Gotham Health Judson.

Thank you.