By the time Ronald Lee was admitted to Bellevue Hospital for psychiatric care in April 2022, the Manhattan facility had become a familiar stomping ground. Lee’s mental health had gone downhill after his teenage son was killed in Far Rockaway a few years before, and he said he had several inpatient psychiatric stays at the hospital.
Before his hospitalization, Lee, 67, was shuffling between family members’ couches and a veterans shelter in Long Island City. He expected to be discharged back to the shelter, although he didn’t feel mentally ready to return.
“You can’t even get a good night’s sleep,” he said.
Instead, after Lee had spent less than two weeks in the hospital, Bellevue staff offered him an alternative: care at a 26-bed facility in Harlem called a medical respite. Respites are programs designed to provide a place for people to stay when they’re no longer sick enough to be hospitalized, but still need follow-up care that they can’t get in shelters or on the street.
The Harlem program is one of just a few medical respite programs in the state, providing services like wound care, physical therapy and social services, while freeing up hospital beds for other patients. Respite providers also aim to connect patients with stable, long-term housing as they leave the programs.
At the Harlem program, Lee would have his own small room and receive three meals a day, checkups, and continued help managing his medication. He could stay for up to three months while a caseworker helped him look for a more stable place to live.
“After they explained the medical respite set up to me, I figured that would be better for me than being around 400 different homeless people,” Lee said.
While medical respite care has so far been limited in New York, it’s on the verge of expanding. In January, the Biden administration gave New York permission to bill Medicaid for the service, opening up a new funding stream. There are currently two respites in Harlem that have about…
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