Building and Landing the Plane While Flying: How New York State Addressed the Needs of People With Serious Mental Illness During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

New York State was the epicenter for COVID-19 in Spring 2020 when little was known about the pandemic. Dire circumstances necessitated New York State's (NYS) public mental health system to rapidly pivot, adapt, and innovate its policies and procedures to ensure continuous high-level care to individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), a population especially vulnerable to both the physical and psychosocial sequelae of COVID-19. NYS rapidly adopted emergency measures to support community providers, expanded the capacity of its State-Operated facilities, created policies to promote improved infection control access, collaborated to enhance the public-private continuum of service to support people with SMI, and broadened the use of new technologies to ensure continued engagement of care.

Inpatient Psychiatry During COVID-19: A Systems Perspective.

Numerous reports describe how individual hospitals responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, but few describe how these changes occurred across a large public health system of care. As the early epicenter of the pandemic, New York State's response, particularly the New York City metropolitan area, included a range of coordinated planning and regulatory efforts to preserve and create medical and intensive care unit capacity where needed; maintain access to acute psychiatric services; and redefine inpatient psychiatric care through strict infection control, easing of regulatory requirements, and use of telehealth. These strategies reflected similar efforts across the United States.