Wednesday, May 9, 2012

Where will the sick people go?


From DNA Info:

The tech campus heralded as making New York City even more cutting edge isn't being celebrated by everyone on Roosevelt Island.

Over the next 18 months, roughly 800 patients will have to be relocated from the 9.9-acre complex on the southern end of Roosevelt Island, built in 1939 as the first public hospital devoted to chronic diseases.

City officials had announced in 2010 that the outmoded Goldwater was slated to close but had not released a moving date at that time. The timeline was only announced after selecting the winning tech campus, which expects its first building on the island in 2017.

Few patients know where they're going yet, though the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation plans to move some to a renovated space in Harlem’s former North General Hospital. Others are going to a new apartment building that will rise on East Harlem's Metropolitan Hospital campus, and more will be scattered across various housing facilities across the city.

Goldwater's sister facility at the northern end of Roosevelt Island, Coler, will still have 800 beds for rehab patients, officials said.

Goldwater is presently home to 476 patients who have suffered spinal-cord injuries, strokes or have degenerative conditions such as cerebral palsy and require care focused on rehabilitation and improving functions for daily living, HHC officials said.

Another 323 are medically fragile patients in need of long-term acute care that can’t be provided at other hospitals. More than 100 of these patients are on ventilators — one of the largest such programs in the country.

For these most serious patients, the former North General hospital will have 201 beds. Another 164 beds will be created there for the rehab patients, HHC officials said.

What will happen to more than 400 other patients is less clear, for now.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why don't we ask the city council that voted Bloomberg in? Or CB1 and CB2 that is drooling over the new development - and too stupid to know that most of the people it attracts will not live or spend much time in the mis-managed cesspools those community boards have become.

Anonymous said...

It was called welfare Island for a good reason. Now that the real estate is too valuable to keep a public hospital there it will be moved. At one time Goldwater Hospital was one of the most caring hospitals that dealt with patients that had very special needs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Island#Current_residents_of_Roosevelt_Island

Anonymous said...

That is not only a historically significant building, but its built like a bunker - lots of metal and concrete.

Will cost a fortune to senselessly destroy.

Big question - how many hospitals can we loose to developers (who don't even live in NYC) before we do something?

Anonymous said...

not to worry, the obamacare ,I.P.A.B.( death panel )will take care of the 400 sick elderly patients.