Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on a Statewide Individual Placement and Support Employment Initiative

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an enormous impact on the provision of behavioral health care services across the United States. This column examines this impact within the context of New York State’s supported employment initiative, which involved 89 implementation sites before the start of the pandemic. The pandemic caused changes to the training and implementation supports provided, the number of sites providing these services, and the ways in which sites provided supported employment services. Although mean self-assessed implementation fidelity decreased modestly, employment outcomes that dipped early in the pandemic rebounded quickly to prepandemic levels.