The human cost of losing a full-service hospital in Manhattan south of 30th Street
By Arthur Z. Schwartz
On January 16, 2024, George Faust, a decades-long resident of Morton Street/West Village Houses, called 311 following a painful fall. The ambulance took him to the Beth Israel Hospital Emergency Room on East 16th Street where X-rays were taken and something was inserted to inflate his lung. The staff then informed him that Beth Israel did not have sufficient personnel to handle a “trauma patient.” He was placed back into an ambulance and taken to St. Luke’s Hospital on 114th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. After arrival at the Mount Sinai facility, he spent nearly two days on a cot in the E.R. George was told they did not have enough staff to move him to an in-patient room. On January 22, he was released after little, if any, treatment. He was prescribed an opioid for the pain and Naproxen. He had to stop taking both because of a negative reaction. There was no follow-up by Mount Sinai.
On February 2, George was taken by ambulance to Bellevue Hospital because his abdominal pain was unbearable. They found blood had accumulated in his lungs and abdomen. George died in Bellevue early in the morning of February 4.
In another case, an unresponsive patient with an “intracerebral hemorrhage — a potentially deadly kind of stroke that involves bleeding inside the brain — was transferred because Beth Israel’s intensive care unit was full. A different patient brought to their emergency department, who was unresponsive and in septic shock, was transferred due to “space and staff limitation” in the intensive care unit.
In another instance, a stroke patient was transferred elsewhere due to lack of interventional radiology doctors. An unidentified staffer told investigators that Mount Sinai’s neurointerventional radiology doctors used to come to the E.R. to treat patients, eliminating the need for a transfer. However, they were directed not to come to Beth Israel to treat certain stroke patients after December 31.
Recently, the hospital transferred a patient with a ruptured appendix who was developing sepsis because the person required “specialty care” that Beth Israel did not provide. Internal anonymized records reviewed by POLITICO corroborated a Beth Israel worker’s description of the events. Both conditions can quickly become life-threatening, so time is of the essence. Instead of receiving surgery at Beth Israel, the patient was forced to wait for more than an hour until an ambulance could bring them to another hospital.
Other recent transfers included a patient with gastrointestinal bleeding, another with gangrene and someone with a bowel obstruction, according to two health care workers familiar with the cases. A patient with an abscess eating into their muscle, which emergency department staff had deemed potentially life-threatening, waited two hours for an ambulance to take them elsewhere for surgery, one worker said. In such cases, health care workers have cited a lack of operating-room capabilities as the reason for transfer, internal records show.
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