FY 2024 Behavioral Health Service Expansion - ODA Primary Health Care Network (“ODA”) seeks FY2024 Behavioral Health Service Expansion (BHSE) funding to increase access to behavioral health services and substance use disorder (SUD) services to respond to unmet need in the service area. Funding will be used increase access to mental health services and SUD that are coordinated with the spectrum of health center services to provide an integrated approach that addresses co-occurring mental health and SUD conditions with general medical illnesses. ODA will use FY24 BHSE funding to add 3.0 FTE behavioral health care providers, which will expand behavioral health services and SUD services to approximately 3,000 patients. BHSE funding will be used to expand services to an underserved community that experiences significant barriers to accessing behavioral health services. Approximately 85% of ODA patients are Yiddish-speaking Hasidic Jews, who follow an ultra-traditional religious lifestyle and ideology and living in an insular community bound by old world cultures and traditions. Within this community, strict codes of modesty are enforced and mingling of genders is limited. These constraints together with a longstanding stigma in the community attached to mental illness creates a unique challenge to identifying patients with mental health needs and ensuring they receive timely and meaningful interventions. ODA is one of the few providers in the service area able to provide Yiddish-speaking, culturally sensitive mental health services to the Hasidic community. The behavioral healthcare landscape in Brooklyn is bleak, particularly in the north and central neighborhoods of Brooklyn where mental health providers struggle to keep pace with a spike in demand for these services. As the leading provider of primary health care services in the service area, and the only service provider offering primary health care and behavioral health and specialty services to the Hasidic population, ODA is uniquely qualified to provide an integrated and coordinated clinical approach to address the mental health care needs of the service area within the primary care setting.
