New York City has poured tens of millions of dollars into a program to treat severely mentally ill people on the streets and in the subways for nearly a decade without ensuring that it was operating effectively, according to an audit made public on Wednesday by the city comptroller.
The program, known as intensive mobile treatment or I.M.T., was meant to help hundreds of the city’s most vulnerable residents by providing them with medication, psychiatric treatment and connections to housing and other services. And it showed that the city agency overseeing the program, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, had not set clear standards to measure its effectiveness despite spending more than $37 million on the initiative last year alone.
The audit also documented a failure by the city to properly monitor the nonprofit organizations it contracts with to run the treatment teams and showed that officials had done little to hold the teams accountable for serious lapses. City officials became aware of more than 130 such issues in recent years, ranging from inadequate staffing to a failure to complete client assessments. But the officials waited months to follow up, the audit found, and when they did, they did not always ensure that the problems were fixed.
One team was allowed to continue operating and even expand its business with the city despite its failure to fill a key behavioral health specialist position for more than three years.
NYTimes Feb 7, 2024
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