A hospital executive with 35 years of behavioral health care experience has been named interim CEO for Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, a state facility that is under a court-approved settlement to improve treatment and safety.

Thomas Rosamilia, the vice president of Behavioral Health for Bergen Regional Medical Center in Paramus, will assume the top job at Greystone on Feb. 3 while the state Health Department searches for a permanent CEO, state spokeswoman Donna Leusner said.

Even though the omicron surge may have peaked an increasing number of New Jersey schools are once again being forced to close their doors for a period of time and offer instruction remotely because of increased positive cases among students and teachers. In response to these disruptions and ongoing pandemic-related stress, the state is funneling more money to school districts so they can expand mental health and counseling services.

Phil Murphy was sworn into a second term as New Jersey’s 56th governor on Tuesday, saying he’ll seek to lower, not just slow, property taxes and declaring the Garden State can show a divided nation the American Dream is alive and can work “for everyone.”

The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers, dealing a blow to a key element of the White House’s plan to address the pandemic as coronavirus cases resulting from the Omicron variant are on the rise. But in a modest victory for President Biden, the court allowed a more limited mandate requiring health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated.

Health care workers in New Jersey and anybody else who has a job in “high-risk congregate settings,” such as long-term care and correctional facilities, will need to be vaccinated against the coronavirus and will no longer be eligible to opt out by undergoing weekly testing, Gov. Phil Murphy announced Wednesday.

An unusual study of the COVID pandemic’s impact on the work and personal lives of an often-overlooked group of health care workers has yielded lessons about the stresses that drive them out of the workforce, their attitudes toward vaccination and testing, and the benefits of their connections with patients.

Supportive health care workers — nursing care assistants, home health aides, food-service workers, custodians and housekeepers employed by hospitals and health care agencies — are primarily Black and Latino, and usually women.

Three measures moving through the state Legislature are focused on addressing mental-health services at colleges and universities. All of the bills, including one identical measure in the Assembly and Senate, seek to bolster the existing Madison Holleran Suicide Prevention Act of 2016 that requires schools make a mental health professional available around the clock to counsel students.

New Jersey now requires Asian American and Pacific Islander history as part of its public school curriculum, the second state in the nation to do so. Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, signed the law Tuesday mandating school districts to teach students in grades K-12 starting in the 2022-2023 school year about the contributions of AAPIs. The bill’s signing comes after it was approved by the New Jersey Legislature in December and follows Illinois, which also signed similar legislation last year.

On Tuesday, Gov. Phil Murphy (D-N.J.) signed a number of bills into law, among which was Assembly Bill 3007, which will address mental health concerns among college students, according to a press release. This bill will require higher education institutions to provide students with access to mental health services and to establish a hotline for students with information regarding those services.

The bill requires the Police Training Commission to contract with crisis intervention training center to provide mental health training to police officers and establish curriculum specific to persons experiencing economic crisis or substance use disorder.

More needle exchange programs designed to help drug users avoid disease and seek treatment will be allowed to open across New Jersey with the state Health Department’s approval, under a bill Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law Tuesday...

The new law, S3009, now gives the state health department sole authority to approve or terminate the exchanges, also known as harm reduction centers.