Beth Israel still on life support as new judge extends order barring closure

BY THE VILLAGE SUN | A State Supreme Court justice has extended a restraining order forbidding any further moves toward closing Beth Israel Hospital.

Although a previous lawsuit against the closing was tossed out this past week by Justice Nicholas Moyne, a new suit has been filed by the same attorney, Village Democratic District Leader Arthur Schwartz, and the new judge on the case, Jeffrey Pearlman, extended the previous temporary restraining order, or T.R.O., on Thursday.

“After a nearly three-hour argument in front of our new judge, Jeffrey Pearlman, he announced that he would continue a temporary restraining order prohibiting the closure of Beth Israel or any further reduction in services until our lawsuit is decided,” Schwartz said. “We will ask for an evidentiary hearing, because there are issues of fact about what the Department of Health did. The judge is basically looking at this as a case where we need to show that D.O.H.’s decision was ‘arbitrary and capricious.'”

D.O.H. has approved Mount Sinai Health System’s closure plan for Beth Israel.

Schwartz said four new affidavits he submitted along with his letter requesting the T.R.O. were extremely helpful, especially ones by two Beth Israel nurses, Linda Charles and Sharlene Waylon, who have worked for the historic Gramercy hospital for 30 and 42 years, respectively.

“Nurses, doctors and other healthcare staff have not fled from BI,” Charles said in her affidavit. “They were pushed out or terminated, or left after being told that despite the law, and the temporary restraining order, that BI was about to close, first by the end of March and then on July 12.”

As The Village Sun previously reported, with the lawsuit still not settled, attorney Schwartz pressured Beth Israel to remove the July 12 closing date posted on its Web site. Just simply deleting that date yielded immediate results, with patient arrivals spiking, and the hospital performing heart procedures, the nurse said.

“Once BI took down the July 12 closing date from its Web site on around July 10, and that hit the media, patient levels at the emergency department increased,” Charles said. “Bellevue was overloaded and started diverting ambulances to BI. Ambulances started arriving from other hospitals which had been dispatched to address emergency calls. I have checked the records for the last three weeks, and I can confirm that we have had 100 to 135 patients admitted to the BI emergency room every day. That would be the equivalent of 36,000 to 49,000 ER admissions per year, similar to the period in 2023 prior to the announcement of the BI closure plan.

“Today we had four patients scheduled to undergo cardiac catheterization who were admitted to the hospital from the ER yesterday. Two were completed,” she said. “The cath lab is adequately staffed for the functioning of two cardiac catheterization operating rooms, with four nurses per shift. The intensive care unit is also adequately staffed, with four nurses. We recently admitted and treated a stroke patient for the first time since BI started turning stroke patients away in December 2023.”

Charles further stated that the patient-to-nurse ratio at Beth Israel perfectly meets state guidelines and is actually currently better than “any other hospital in the area,” including both Bellevue and N.Y.U. Langone.

“Bellevue and N.Y.U., the two closest hospitals, are from my understanding running between 10:1 and 14:1 ratios, which are far less safe than at BI,” the nurse asserted. “Other Mount Sinai Hospital affiliates are similarly overwhelmed.”

Charles further said closing the Beth Israel emergency room “will cause another major problem,” in that the hospital gets “a fair number of patients with psychiatric emergencies,” many sent to it from Bellevue, which runs at capacity, she noted.

“BI has a Comprehensive Psychiatric Evaluation Emergency Program, also known as CPEEP, which allows prompt assessment of psychiatric patients,” the veteran nurse testified. “Mount Sinai’s new psychiatric facility, Rivington House, which is on the Lower East Side, does not have a CPEEP program, and could not be a recipient of psychiatric emergency patients. With Bellevue at its limit, it is not clear where these patients would go.”

Meanwhile, Waylon, the other nurse who submitted an affidavit, stated that while staff did leave Beth Israel over the past year, they felt like they had no choice.

“Staff have left BI,” she said. “But the departures were hardly a situation of doctors, medical professionals and nurses fleeing the hospital in droves. According to an article which appeared in Crain’s Magazine today, [as] soon as Beth Israel submitted its closure plan in October 2023, it terminated the contracts of scores, if not hundreds, of doctors. On the nursing and non-physician medical staff side, the hospital executives made it clear that the hospital was going to close and that it planned to pretty much shut BI down by July 12.”

Waylon is a union delegate for Local 1199 SEIU, which represents most of the hospital’s non-doctor staff.

“Those [union] staffers, nurses, physician assistants, aides, etc., were scheduled, almost immediately after the [closure] plan was filed, to attend ‘job fairs,’ sometimes held twice a week,” she said. “At these ‘fairs,’ jobs available at other Mount Sinai Hospital System hospitals were posted. … It was apparent to all that nothing was going to stop BI from closing entirely on July 12… . This made the job fairs pretty important to BI nurses and staff; jobs were available, but it was unclear how long the jobs would be held open. Everyone was required to pick a job; if an employee didn’t select one, that employee would not have a job when BI closed.”

Also submitting an affidavit against the closing was Dr. Kimberly Murdaugh. She noted how the state Department of Health in 2017 approved a prior closure plan for Beth Israel predicated on construction of a replacement, 70-bed mini-hospital that would have accommodated 70,000 patients per year.

By contrast, she said, “D.O.H. has now approved Mount Sinai’s plan to close the current hospital entirely, leaving a few measly crumbs in its wake.”

The Beth Israel doctor said, while Mount Sinai is pledging it will give $20 million to Bellevue Hospital to expand its ER, it would actually be allocated over three years and is thus “an insufficient amount of funding.”

Murdaugh also expressed concern about another element of the mitigation plan by Mount Sinai — to create an urgent-care center at the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary campus on E. 14th Street.

“The timing of the opening of a promised new urgent-care center…and how long it would continue in operation threatens Lower Manhattan residents’ access to immediate care,” she said.

The urgent care is required to operate 24/7 — yet only for the first three months.

In addition, another affidavit was submitted by Jeannine Kiely, a former Community Board 2 chairperson who previously worked in nonprofit healthcare finance, including as director in Citibank’s healthcare group.

Mount Sinai argues that Beth Israel had been losing $18 million per month, making it economically unviable to keep open. However, opponents charge Mount Sinai, in recent years, has purposefully “sabotaged” Beth Israel’s finances by transferring out medical departments to its other hospitals, with the goal of selling off the hospital’s lucrative real estate, located just off of Stuyvesant Square Park.

“Following its acquisition of BIMC [Beth Israel Medical Center],” Kiely said, “MSHS quickly began to remove services from Beth Israel Hospital and transfer them to Mount Sinai Hospital, the network’s flagship facility located on the Upper East Side, or Mount Sinai West, located in Midtown West. Services removed included cardiac surgery, maternity, neonatal care, pediatrics, chemical dependency and rehabilitation.

“Specifically, in October 2015, MSHS decertified 31 chemical dependency beds. In August 2016, MSHS decertified 26 rehabilitation beds. In July 2017, MSHS decertified 25 pediatric beds, 31 neonatal beds, 42 maternity beds and all of cardiac surgery. In October 2019, MSHS converted 5 surgical beds to pediatric ICU beds, then transferred them to MSH. In March 2020, MSHS decertified 38 psychiatric and chemical dependency beds, and after the Mount Sinai Behavioral Health Center [on Rivington Street] opened in 2023, MSHS moved 115 chemical dependency and psychiatric beds to the newly opened facility.

“Over the same time period,” Kiely noted, “net patient revenue at BIMC immediately began to suffer, dropping precipitously from $1,126,499,000 in 2012 to $725,430,000 in 2020, as reported in the audited financial statements for BIMC. This was not because of decreased need; it was due to a decrease in revenue generating services, particularly the cardiac surgery, maternity, neonatal and pediatric surgery units.”

Attorney Schwartz called for more Beth Israel staffers, in particular, to come forward and offer their testimony about the embattled hospital and the forced-closure plan.

“The nurses’ affidavits helped tremendously,” he said. “We need more voices from the inside.”