Creating Care That Continues After Discharge

The adult made real the dreams of the child. Today, Delmadge is director of the Social Work Behavioral Health Department at Kings County Hospital Center, one of the city’s largest hospitals in Brooklyn. She leads a team of more than 100 social workers and other staff offering inpatient, outpatient, as well emergency services, to those with mental health and drug abuse challenges in East Flatbush, a Brooklyn community not known to be Instagrammed by influencers and hipsters.

“I always imagined being in a position where I could create opportunities for individuals with limited resources to have access to quality care, whether they can afford it or not,” she says. “The stigma around mental health has also been a concern of mine and creating awareness and education has been a passion that I pursue every single day.”

Her dedication over a 15-year career to date is paying off with creative and practical programs. Her department has been awarded numerous grants that allow her and her team to develop, implement and run creative, on-the-ground programs for roughly thousands of Brooklyn residents.

One such program offers a rare, long-term approach to adults and children with mental health issues, dealing with chronic and vital long-term needs, regardless of ability to pay. When patients are admitted to the hospital, a care team of doctors, nurses, therapists and others begin getting to know them and their needs. Once they leave the hospital, they aren’t abandoned. Along with social workers and other clinicians, a team of housing, insurance and benefits specialists help cut through red tape to get the patients what they need.

“This is intimately concrete care,” says Delmadge, who is proud to have spearheaded this particular project. “The main goal is to reduce repeat hospitalizations. To do that, people need help in navigating a system you and I might have difficulty doing. We help them connect to treatment, help them to continue that treatment, help stabilize them in everyday and in every way open to us. Their caseworker engages with them as people, humans who need help, not revolving door admissions.”

Speaking of admissions, Delmadge entered Touro University Graduate School of Social Work only after her first plan to become a nurse was ended by the increasingly difficult science and math courses. “I licked my wounds, went into a depression, then one day I got back up and went to work,” she says, now laughing over a once serious crisis of disappointment.

Delmadge says being a Touro-taught social worker filled her with pride — and purpose. “The classes were flexible — crucial for working adults,” explains Delmadge, who graduated with honors. “And they were intimate; we were a part of an institution that was committed to teaching us, not just the academics of social work, but the values, the commitment required to do the work. We felt we were being sent out in the world to do important, meaningful work.”

A married mother of three, including an infant, Delmadge is a tireless advocate for the profession, social justice, health equity and behavioral health. So far, the ideas flow and the grants come, and Delmadge stays focused on the people who need mental health services and oversee programs to serve them.

“This is a profession where the organ that is even more important than the mind, is the heart,” she says. “For social work to succeed, we must see the person before we can begin to solve the problem. That takes the heart.”