The ultimate goal of HELP, said Mrs. Bert, is to prevent teen suicide. According to the Suicide Prevention Resource Center based in Washington, D.C., 15 to 19 year olds hold the highest attempted-suicide hospitalization rates in New York State.

1. News From:
For Immediate Release December 12, 2012
Contact: Damian Becker, Manager of Media Relations
South Nassau Communities Hospital
(516) 377-5370
HELP is Here for LI’s Youth, Teens
Oceanside, NY – Long Island youth and teenagers isolated and under duress from
emotionally painful issues such as bullying, peer pressure and school demands have a “lifeline”
that they can turn to for immediate HELP.
“Kids in crisis sometimes turn to their friends, but their friends don’t have the experience
or resources to guide them,” said Lynn Bert, R.N., nurse manager of pediatrics at South Nassau
Communities Hospital in Oceanside, NY, and a mother of three, two of whom are teenagers.
So, Mrs. Bert conceived HELP (Hospitals Empowering Lifelines through Peers), a
program to provide adolescents, age 13 to 18, with the hotline number of the Long Island Crisis
Center (LICC), which connects callers to trained counselors in real-time.
While LICC has been available in the community, Mrs. Bert says that teens underuse its
services either due to lack of awareness of the program or failure to recognize that they need the
compassionate help of a trained counselor to cope and overcome their issues. HELP encourages
and directs teenagers to store the LICC hotline number in their cell phones—a popular method of
communication among today’s youth— and then share it with three friends.
The ultimate goal of HELP, said Mrs. Bert, is to prevent teen suicide. According to the
Suicide Prevention Resource Center based in Washington, D.C., 15 to 19 year olds hold the
highest attempted-suicide hospitalization rates in New York State.
In the past couple of months since HELP has been launched, Mrs. Bert and a team of
nurses, joined by a social worker, pediatrician and child life specialist, have educated South
Nassau’s health care professionals about the program. They are instructing their colleagues who
work in the Pediatric Unit or Pediatric Emergency Department to inform teenage patients before
they are discharged about HELP.

2. “At the time of discharge, nurses ask them to enter the crisis center’s text and phone
number into their cell phones and then to share the number with three friends,” she explained.
“They, in turn, are asked to share the number with three more friends.”
Additionally, Mrs. Bert and her team have introduced HELP to schools and hospitals
throughout Long Island and are posting posters promoting HELP in school cafeterias and
hallways as well as hospital lobbies and waiting areas. The poster includes a QR code (which
can be found at the end of the press release) that can be scanned with smart phones to
automatically store the crisis center’s text and phone numbers in the contacts folder. For more
information about HELP, call (516) 632-4039.
South Nassau Communities Hospital is one of the region’s largest hospitals, with 435
beds, more than 900 physicians and 3,000 employees. Located in Oceanside, NY, the hospital is
an acute-care, not-for-profit teaching hospital that provides state-of-the-art care in cardiac,
oncologic, orthopedic, bariatric, pain management, mental health and emergency services. In
addition to its extensive outpatient specialty centers, South Nassau provides emergency and
elective angioplasty and is the only hospital on Long Island with the Novalis Tx™ and Gamma
Knife® radiosurgery technologies. South Nassau is a designated Stroke Center by the New York
State Department of Health and Comprehensive Community Cancer Center by the American
College of Surgeons and is recognized as a Bariatric Surgery Center of Excellence by the
American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery. For more information, visit
www.southnassau.org.
# # #