Mount Sinai wants to close one of the last hospitals in Lower Manhattan

One of Lower Manhattan’s last remaining hospitals may have to close next year, despite opposition from local officials and health activists who say the lessons of the pandemic are not being heeded.

Mount Sinai Health System last week asked government officials to approve a plan to close Mount Sinai Beth Israel, a major provider of medical care for Lower East Side residents that was founded in 1889. The hospital system said the Beth Israel facility was also losing money. fast pace and that it planned to close it in July 2024.

The closure would mean longer ambulance rides and wait times for some downtown residents suffering strokes and heart attacks, nurses who work at the hospital said. And it will most likely lead to overcrowding and longer wait times in hospital emergency rooms across the city.

“People will probably die as a result,” said Sharlene Waylon, a nurse who has worked at the hospital for 41 years.

If it goes ahead, the hospital’s disappearance would leave Lower Manhattan residents with few major medical institutions. The largest hospital left to serve that area would be NewYork-Presbyterian/Lower Manhattan Hospital, a small facility with fewer than 200 beds. Beth Israel, on the other hand, officially has about 696 beds, although far fewer are staffed and on some days only a quarter of them are filled with patients.

Most major hospitals in neighborhoods like Greenwich Village, the Lower East Side, Little Italy and Chinatown are closed. In the past two decades alone, Cabrini Hospital in the Gramercy Park neighborhood and St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village have closed.

“Lower Manhattan is already short on hospital beds, and the closure of Beth Israel will make that situation worse,” said Lois Uttley, a health care researcher and consultant who has monitored hospital consolidation and closures.

Just three years ago, some hospitals were overwhelmed by a surge of patients during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. That was especially true in Queens, where years of hospital closures overwhelmed the few remaining hospitals, including Elmhurst.

During the first deadly phase of the pandemic, Beth Israel cared for more than 1,700 Covid patients — 165 of whom died, according to state statistics.

“Hopefully New York State has learned lessons from the pandemic when there wasn’t enough hospital capacity,” Ms. Uttley said.

State hospital regulators must approve Mount Sinai’s request. In this sense, the request to close Beth Israel represents a test of sorts: Has the pandemic changed the state’s approach to hospital closures, which the state has traditionally been willing to condone and even encourage?

Many more surgeries and medical care are taking place on an outpatient basis or entirely outside of hospitals than in the past, which has been the logic behind some decisions to close hospitals. But the reduction in hospital beds has exacerbated crowding in hospital emergency rooms across the city.

Mount Sinai has said that with occupancy rates so low, the Beth Israel campus will lose $150 million a year. “These continued and growing losses pose a real existential threat to the viability and future of the entire Mount Sinai Health system,” Beth Israel Campus President Elizabeth Sellman said. wrote in a letter to the Ministry of Health on October 25.

The letter noted that Mount Sinai had invested in new downtown facilities, including a large one behavioral health center on Rivington Street which opened this year.

On Thursday afternoon, Rose Kacic, who was born in Beth Israel 30 years ago, visited the hospital to visit her 59-year-old mother, who was experiencing a variety of health problems.

“It’s upsetting to know they’re closing,” she said. “It’s a very essential part of the community,” she added. Her three brothers were also born at Beth Israel, and she said it had been her family’s hospital since her mother moved to New York from Puerto Rico.

“Now I have to worry about where to go if something bad happens,” she said, noting that Bellevue, the nearest hospital, was 10 blocks away.

Local MP Harvey Epstein expressed concern that Mount Sinai’s decision to close Beth Israel was motivated by what the hospital’s properties could fetch if sold to developers.

“Is this just a real estate robbery for them?” Mr. Epstein wondered this week in a telephone interview.

The history of Beth Israel is linked to the influx of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe who settled in the Lower East Side in the late 19th century. In 1889, a group of these newcomers decided to establish a pharmacy and later a hospital. Not only did the Lower East Side, which was emerging as one of the most densely populated places on earth, need its own medical facilities, but the newcomers also sought kosher food and culturally appropriate treatments.

Mount Sinai Hospital, further into town, was originally founded to care for needy Jews and was staffed by many Jewish physicians, but it was considered unwelcoming to the unassimilated Jews of Russia.

Mount Sinai’s plans to close Beth Israel did not come out of the blue. Mount Sinai and Beth Israel have been part of the same system for a decade, since Mount Sinai, a leading hospital on the edge of the Upper East Side and Harlem, merged with Continuum Health Partners, which managed Beth Israel and two St. Luke’s. -Roosevelt Campuses.

In 2016, Mount Sinai proposed closing Beth Israel and replacing it with a much smaller hospital with just 70 beds. But that plan was put on hold during the pandemic.

Liset Cruz reporting contributed.