The Bridge as a Social Work Agency

While Social Work Month has passed, we continue to celebrate The Bridge as a social work agency. On April 14th at 3:30pm, The Bridge will be hosting an afternoon reception honoring Rory Gilbert, LMSW,  the Director of Community Mental Health and Case Management Programs, as a Bridge Social Worker of Distinction, along with the entire PROS staff. We are also very excited to have the distinguished Merril Rotter, MD as the featured speaker. Dr. Rotter is a leading expert on providing mental health services to men and women who have serious mental illness and who have been in the criminal justice system. Dr. Rotter will be giving a talk on the topic of “Today’s Clients: Challenges From A to Z.”

The Bridge highly values the work that our social workers do every day to help clients lead better and more independent lives. Please contact Denise Gutierrez at dgutierrez@thebridgeny.org to attend this event. The event will be held at our headquarters:
248 West 108th Street, NYC

William F. Ryan Health Center at The Bridge

We have made healthcare a priority with the William F. Ryan Health Center at The Bridge. Because the mental health system does not pay for medical services, we’ve had quite an adventure providing medical services to our clients.

More than 25 years ago, in recognition that it was simply inadequate to be treating just our clients’ mental health conditions while ignoring their medical needs, The Bridge conducted its first foray into healthcare. A friendly primary care doctor agreed to give ten randomly selected clients a full physical exam. The results were that more than 60 medical conditions were found in the ten clients.

For the past decade, we have had a remarkable partnership with the William F. Ryan Community Health Center, a Federally-Qualified Health Center, which operates an on-site medical clinic at The Bridge headquarters building. The clinic provides routine physicals, follow-up and monitoring of clients’ chronic health conditions and emergency walk-in services. The Ryan operation is funded by Medicaid and a Federal grant; The Bridge provides free space for the clinic. The partnership entails close cooperation between Bridge and Ryan staff to provide truly integrated health services.

Hundreds of Bridge clients use the Ryan Center clinic each year, avoiding emergency rooms and fragmented hospital-based care, and benefiting from a collaboration that provides accessible, high quality health care that is integrated with our own mental health and substance abuse services. The Bridge/Ryan partnership addresses a critical need of our clients in a way that is both creative and cost-effective.