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| DATE | 2024-07-27 |
| FROM | Ruben Safir
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| SUBJECT | Subject: [Hangout - NYLXS] Remember when we didn't have enough BEDS for
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/26/nyregion/mount-sinai-beth-israel-hospital-closure.html
New York Will Allow Beth Israel Hospital to Close
The health facility’s potential closure had been contentious following
the shuttering of other hospitals serving Lower Manhattan.
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The round facade of Mount Sinai seen flanked by leafy trees.
Mount Sinai, Beth Israel’s parent hospital system, has argued that the
facility is losing so much money that it threatens the entire
system.Credit...José A. Alvarado Jr. for The New York Times
Joseph Goldstein
By Joseph Goldstein
July 26, 2024
The New York State Department of Health has agreed to allow a major
hospital in Manhattan to close, which would leave many downtown
residents farther away from emergency medical care.
The fate of the hospital, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, has been up in the
air since 2016, when its parent hospital system first announced a
closure plan. The hospital survived for years, kept alive by community
activists who filed lawsuits to keep it open, as well as by the
coronavirus pandemic, which filled its beds with critically ill patients.
Over the past year, however, the parent hospital system, Mount Sinai,
renewed its push to close Beth Israel, claiming the facility was losing
so much money that the losses threatened the entire hospital system, one
of the city’s largest.
On Thursday the State Health Department, which evaluates hospital
closure proposals, said that it had approved Mount Sinai’s plan to close
Beth Israel, with several conditions.
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The conditions are aimed at ensuring that nearby hospitals aren’t
overwhelmed by the increase of patients expected after Beth Israel
closes. The hospital, at 16th Street and First Avenue, treated just
under 50,000 patients last year, and handles about 6 percent of all
emergency room visits in Manhattan. Once it closes, many of those
patients will most likely land at Bellevue or NYU Langone Health, two
hospitals both several blocks up First Avenue from Beth Israel.
The Health Department said Beth Israel must fund an expansion of the
emergency room at Bellevue, the flagship of the city’s public hospital
system. Another condition is that Beth Israel must run an urgent care
center, open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for three months.
The state’s decision removes a major hurdle standing in the way of Mount
Sinai’s closure, but for the moment, the hospital must stay open: It
still faces a lawsuit challenging the closing, and a judge has ordered
the facility not to reduce its medical services in the meantime. But
many doctors and nurses have left over the past year to find more secure
jobs elsewhere. At times, care has suffered and patients have been
rerouted to other hospitals because Beth Israel is no longer able to
respond to strokes and some other medical emergencies.
A spokesman for the Mount Sinai hospital system, Loren Riegelhaupt, said
in a statement that Beth Israel would remain open and accept patients,
for now.
Beth Israel was founded in 1889, initially as a dispensary serving
mainly Jewish immigrants on the Lower East Side. It grew into a major
Manhattan hospital, but has struggled in recent years.
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The past 20 years have seen the closure of two large nearby hospitals:
Cabrini in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and St. Vincent’s in Greenwich
Village.
In a letter to the state health commissioner on Thursday, a longtime
health activist, Mark Hannay, wrote that allowing the closure to go
forward risked leaving “a dangerous gap in availability of emergency
care in Lower Manhattan.”
Joseph Goldstein covers health care in New York for The Times, following
years of criminal justice and police reporting. More about Joseph Goldstein
A version of this article appears in print on July 27, 2024, Section A,
Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: State Officials Agree
to Let A Downtown Hospital Close. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
See more on: Beth Israel Medical Center
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