Health execs ‘feared for their safety’ after attorney threatened to have them ‘locked up’ over push to close Beth Israel

BY PHYLLIS ECKHAUS | It’s not just the weather that’s hot.

In the battle over Beth Israel Hospital, which owner Mount Sinai Health Systems seeks to close ASAP, the rhetoric is flaming.

This past week, as attorneys for the hospital system pressed the judge in the ongoing stop-the-closure lawsuit to lift a legal roadblock to closure, they declared that a threat by opposing counsel Arthur Schwartz — and its coverage in The Village Sun — caused Mount Sinai C.E.O. Brendan Carr and Beth Israel President Elizabeth Sellman to fear for their safety, a claim Schwartz dismissed as “preposterous.”

Mount Sinai attorney David Friedman apparently made the allegation in a July 18 letter to the court.

Schwartz had threatened to have the two hospital honchos “locked up” for contempt of court if they did not clearly communicate to Beth Israel employees and the public that the health hub would not close July 12. On July 11, the day following Schwartz’s threat, the Beth Israel Web site, which had broadcast the July 12 closure date, was revised and Beth Israel told staff that the closure was postponed indefinitely.

There are two legal obstacles to Beth Israel’s closure. One is the temporary restraining order (T.R.O.) issued by the judge in the state court lawsuit brought by Schwartz on behalf of community advocates.

The other hurdle is the state Department of Health — and its refusal thus far to approve a Beth Israel closure plan. Indeed, D.O.H. had repeatedly appeared to “get tough” with Mount Sinai — rejecting a closure plan, requiring Mount Sinai to explain how patients historically served by Beth Israel would continue to receive care following closure, and issuing a “cease-and-desist” order requiring Mount Sinai both to stop dismantling Beth Israel and to restore eliminated services.

But D.O.H. never enforced its cease-and-desist order and has been conspicuously silent since April, when it rejected Mount Sinai’s original closure plan as “incomplete.”

In court filings this past week, and in a July 17 article in Politico, Mount Sinai’s ramped-up rhetoric described Beth Israel as so devoid of staff and services as to potentially endanger patient safety.

According to Politico: “Staffing instability has reached a critical point where we are no longer able to continue reliably providing safe patient care,” Liz Sellman, the hospital’s president and C.O.O., stated in an affirmation filed Monday [July 15]. “Staffing at the Hospital is sufficiently thin and unstable that even a relatively minor event, such as staff calling out sick, could have a debilitating and potentially life-threatening effect at the Hospital. These are not appropriate conditions under which to operate a hospital.”

Both the T.R.O. and the D.O.H. order mandate that Mount Sinai replace lost Beth Israel staff.

Following the Politico article, in a July 19 letter to the court, Schwartz challenged the patient safety claim, declaring it “most interesting” that “just one week ago the Bellevue Emergency Room became so overloaded that ambulances were diverted to Beth Israel. Nurses called me and said they were functioning like a hospital again, and had actually [done] a cardiac catheterization to a STEMI [severe heart attack] Patient, the first since March. So while the executives present this court with affidavits with concern about patient safety, the hospital, even with its limited staff, was serving the community again.”

Schwartz has also praised the care his 102-year-old mother has twice recently received at the Beth Israel emergency room, where he has managed to have her admitted — over the objections of ambulance crews told not not to send patients to Beth Israel.

The Save Beth Israel and New York Eye & Ear Campaign, alarmed by the Politico article, issued a media statement July 19, expressing fear that Mount Sinai could peremptorily close down Beth Israel —“the last remaining community hospital in Lower Manhattan” — in violation of the legal roadblocks in its path.

Condemning Mount Sinai’s “bullying” tactics, the campaign called on D.O.H. to “hold firm against such stampede attempts” and insist on a closure plan “that guarantees sufficient and continued access to inpatient and emergency care in Lower Manhattan.”

The campaign, in its statement, was also scathing in its description of Beth Israel’s staffing issues, saying, “Once again, [Mount Sinai] is saying they must take immediate closure action because of staff departures that they claim jeopardize patient safety, as if they had no role in creating such a crisis. It’s as if staff departures at [Beth Israel] are like the weather over which no one has any control — they just sort of happen, like a thunderstorm or heat wave.”

Instead, the campaign contended that current and former Beth Israel staff have reported Mount Sinai as having “deliberately orchestrated and forced many departures from [Beth Israel] since last fall through job fairs and the like. These workers say they were told by…management that if they didn’t participate or cooperate, their ongoing employment would or could not be guaranteed” at either Beth Israel or Mount Sinai.

The campaign further asserted that Mount Sinai “has all the necessary resources to recruit and retain appropriate staffing…that will assure proper patient safety standards are being met while its proposed closure plan for [Beth Israel] is under consideration by D.O.H. and the matter is before a state court.” The health system “can easily hire temporary staff, and traveling doctors and nurses to assure patient safety, something they are obligated to do under law,” the campaign said. “They are simply choosing not to do so.”

Campaign coordinator Mark Hannay observed to The Village Sun that Mount Sinai’s current effort to publicize Beth Israel as unsafe is, what he called, “a self-fulfilling prophecy” designed to further deplete the hospital of staff and patients.

The next court date is Aug. 8. Mount Sinai’s attorneys have requested that the court use that date to hear Mount Sinai’s arguments for lifting the T.R.O.

In his July 19 letter, Schwartz opposed that request, urging the court instead to proceed with the full case: “The reality is that once the T.R.O. is lifted, it will not be possible to put the hospital back together again.”