By Ilana Siyance
Health care advocates and Manhattan elected officials are vexed about the planned closure and relocation of Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s emergency room in downtown Manhattan.
As reported by the NY Post, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, which now offers close to 700 hospital beds on 1st Avenue and East 16th Street, is slated to close and relocate two blocks away to a facility which offers only 70 inpatient beds and an emergency department.
Advocates wrote a letter this week to state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker demanding answers and saying that the proposed replacement of Beth Israel “will create significant changes in the health delivery system in lower Manhattan”.
Though Mount Sinai Hospital is considered one of the best in the country, nurses and other staffers have told the Post that the emergency department is turning into a “war zone”, with dire staffing shortages due to a fixation on profits. They allege that critical care patients are being turned away and patients are going into cardiac arrest in the emergency room without anyone to care for them. “I had to follow my moral compass and leave and decide this is not an organization that cares for patients,” said Dr. Eric Barton, former head of emergency departments for the Mount Sinai hospital network, who quit last year.
The completed Upper East Side hospital facility, which will share a campus with Mount Sinai’s New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, is slated to open in 2023. Once the new building is ready, the hospital on 1st and 16th Street will be sold.
In the advocate’s letter, though, they note that Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s own filings show that the new emergency department will serve 70,000 visits a year, which is “far less than the 87,000 visits to the existing [emergency department] last year.” Their consultant, who reviewed the hospital’s application, suggested that the new emergency room “would actually only accommodate about 40,500 [emergency department] visits a year,” the letter alleges.
“I’m worried there won’t be capacity to take in as many people as are necessary,” said Democratic state Sen. Brad Hoylman. “Clearly the hospitals call this rightsizing, but we in the community look at it as cost-cutting and the impact on patient care is worrisome.” Similarly, Democratic Assemblyman Harvey Epstein also spoke out to say he is “deeply concerned”. “They have a physical building in place that would take money to rehab but they’re making an economic decision because they want to. It doesn’t mean it was the right decision,” said Epstein. Epstein’s office said the state Health Department is conducting a review of the project, which was originally announced in 2016.
A representative for Mount Sinai made a statement saying: “The suggestion that our new Mount Sinai Beth Israel emergency room can only handle 45,000 visits per year is simply wrong.” “In fact, the new emergency room will be 30 percent larger than our existing emergency room. We are designing and building a new, state-of-the-art [emergency department], with all private rooms, that we are confident will meet the needs of the community for decades to come.”
