The health facility’s potential closure had been contentious following the shuttering of other hospitals serving Lower Manhattan.
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.
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.
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.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
