Predictably, the downtown-New York emergency rooms left to care for are patients since the April 30 closing of St. Vincent's Hospital are becoming increasingly crowded, causing concern among community members and health officials.
The four remaining downtown ERs--Bellevue Hospital Center, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York Downtown Hospital and New York University Langone Medical Center--have seen spikes in visits in May between 11 and 29 percent over 2008, reports the Wall Street Journal. ERs were unusually crowded in May 2009 because of the swine-flu scare, but visits rose slightly this May at all but Downtown's emergency room.
Despite the burden of having to reroute the 60,000 patients the defunct Greenwich Village hospital would have treated, however, ambulances are getting patients to the remaining ERs quicker and hospitals are providing care more efficiently.
According to city fire officials, the average time to take someone to a lower Manhattan ER has dropped to 6.5 minutes, 13 seconds faster than in May 2009. In addition, emergency medical technicians, working with hospital personnel, have shrunk by three minutes the time they spend handing off patients to hospital staff before they're ready for their next call, said Steve Ritea, a spokesman for the fire department.
Nonetheless, it is unclear how the crowding may impact public health. "We don't know the outcomes of people who actually need emergency care, who have to go a longer distance to get that emergency care," said state Sen. Tom Duane, a Democrat who lives in Chelsea and favors having a hospital with emergency care in the West Village again. "It would be better to have emergency care accessible 24/7 as close to where people in the lower West Side live and work."
And on Monday, Mark Solazzo, chief operating officer of North Shore-LIJ, the organization that will run the urgent care center replacing St. Vincent's Hospital, met with citizens to update them on plans for the facility, which is slated to open in September on a temporary basis at the West 12th Street location for St. Vincent's.
The crowd of hundreds was not satisfied, however, angry not only that the facility did not open immediately, but insisting that an urgent care center wouldn't be adequate anyway, reports DNAinfo.com.
"We thought it was going to happen there, right away. Here we are and there's still nothing," said Eileen Dunn, who had worked at St. Vincent's for 24 years and is president of the local chapter of the New York State Nurses Association. "It fuels the frustration," she added. "We don't want urgent care--what we need is a hospital."
Terry Lynam, a vice president at North Shore-LIJ, said that the organization was only contracted by the state to provide an urgent care center; and that plans for any additional health services, such as a fully-functional ER, would have to go back through the state.
To learn more:
- see this piece in the Wall Street Journal
- read the article on DNAinfo.com