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发帖数: 29846 | 1 Vote Sets Hospital's Closure .
By LAURA KUSISTO
State university officials on Friday voted to close Long Island College
Hospital, a money-losing downtown Brooklyn institution whose possible demise
has sparked outrage and sadness among workers and community members.
The board of the State University of New York voted unanimously to move
forward with closing the hospital. As trustees moved to vote, their voices
were drowned out by chants of "postpone the vote" and "shame, shame" from
the roughly 50 people in attendance, mostly nurses and hospital workers.
John Williams, president of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which runs LICH,
recommended to the board Thursday that the hospital be closed, saying it has
a projected deficit of $41 million this fiscal year. At a public hearing
later Thursday, local politicians, hospital workers and patients testified
in favor of saving the 155-year-old hospital, the only one in downtown
Brooklyn.
Before the vote, the SUNY board's chairman, Carl McCall, asked Mr. Williams
to spend the coming months creating a more detailed plan for closing the
hospital, including determining how to help employees who will lose their
jobs; working with the community to study how to continue providing medical
service to downtown Brooklyn; and creating a plan to preserve SUNY Downstate
's other Brooklyn hospitals, in Bay Ridge and Flatbush.
"Overall, the issue here is money. We are about to run out of money," Mr.
McCall said.
Mr. Williams said in an interview Thursday that closing the hospital could
take anywhere from a couple of weeks to months. SUNY officials will have to
submit a closure plan for approval to the state Health Department, which
could make modifications. The state agency rarely, however, reverses a
hospital's decision to close.
Hospital workers and union officials nonetheless insisted after the vote
that the hospital's fate isn't yet sealed. They said they would spend the
coming months pressuring the department to reject the closure plan.
"I'm hoping that the Department of Health will see the need…when they see
that we provide asthma care, we provide emergency care, we provide cardiac
care. We're a full-service hospital, so to close us down just doesn't seem
sensible," said Maritza Pabon, 50, a staffing coordinator at the hospital.
Ronnie Babb, an area vice president with 1199 SEIU, a health-care workers
union, dismissed officials' assurances that they would try to find jobs for
the roughly 2,000 workers at the hospital, noting a number of health-care
centers in the borough are also in distress or danger of closing. "Where are
they going to find them?" he said.
"Our fight isn't over," state Sen. Daniel Squadron said in a statement after
the vote. The Health Department "has an opportunity to ensure the needs of
this community and all of Brooklyn are met—and that's precisely what we
will urge it to do."
Write to Laura Kusisto at l***********[email protected] |
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