FROM THE VILLAGE SUN | A state Supreme Court judge has issued a temporary restraining order barring any further action to close Beth Israel Hospital.

Although a previous lawsuit challenging the closure was dismissed last week by Judge Nicholas Moyne, the same attorney, Arthur Schwartz, district leader for the village’s Democrats, has filed a new lawsuit, and the new judge in that case, Jeffrey Pearlstein, on Thursday extended the previous injunction.

“After a nearly three-hour hearing before our new judge, Jeffrey Pearlstein, he announced that he would maintain a temporary restraining order prohibiting the closing of Beth Israel or further limiting services until our lawsuit is decided,” Schwartz said. “We will request an evidentiary hearing because there are actual questions about the Department of Health’s actions. The judge essentially views this as a case where we must prove that the Department of Health’s decision was ‘arbitrary and capricious.'”

The Department of Health has approved Mount Sinai Health System’s closure plan for Beth Israel.

Schwartz said four new affidavits he submitted with his brief requesting the injunction have been extremely helpful, particularly those from two Beth Israel nurses, Linda Charles and Sharlene Waylon, who have worked at the historic Gramercy hospital for 30 and 42 years, respectively.

“Nurses, doctors and other health care workers did not flee BI,” Charles said in her affidavit. “They were forced out or fired or left after being told that BI would shut down first in late March and then on July 12, despite the law and the injunction.”

As The Village Sun previously reported, with the litigation still pending, attorney Schwartz pressured Beth Israel to remove the July 12 deadline posted on its website. Simply removing that date had an immediate impact: Patient numbers skyrocketed and the hospital was performing cardiac surgeries, the nurse said.

“After BI removed the July 12 closure date from its website on July 10 and this leaked into the media, the number of patients in the emergency department increased,” Charles said. “Bellevue was overwhelmed and began diverting ambulances to BI. Ambulances from other hospitals that had been assigned to emergency calls began arriving. I have reviewed records for the past three weeks and can confirm that we have had 100 to 135 patients in BI’s emergency department daily. That equates to 36,000 to 49,000 emergency department admissions per year, similar to the time period in 2023 before the announcement of the BI closure plan.

“Today we had four patients who were scheduled for cardiac catheterization who were admitted to the hospital from the emergency department yesterday. Two patients completed their examinations,” she said. “The cath lab is adequately staffed with four nurses per shift to operate two cardiac catheter operating rooms. 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 began turning away stroke patients in December 2023.”

Charles further explained that the patient-to-nurse ratio at Beth Israel is fully compliant with state guidelines and is currently better than “any other hospital in the area,” both Bellevue and NYU Langone.

“Bellevue and NYU, the two closest hospitals, have a ratio of 10:1 to 14:1, as far as I know, which is far more unsafe than BI,” the nurse explained. “Other hospitals affiliated with Mount Sinai Hospital are similarly overwhelmed.”

Charles went on to say that closing Beth Israel’s emergency room “will create another major problem” because the hospital is receiving “a significant number of patients with psychiatric emergencies,” many of whom are being referred from Bellevue, which is operating at capacity.

“BI has a comprehensive emergency psychiatric evaluation program, also called CPEEP, which allows for immediate evaluation of psychiatric patients,” the veteran nurse testified. “Mount Sinai’s new psychiatric facility, Rivington House, located on the Lower East Side, does not have a CPEEP program and cannot accommodate emergency psychiatric patients. With Bellevue stretched to its limits, it is not clear where these patients will go.”

Meanwhile, Waylon, the other nurse who provided a sworn statement, said that although staff left Beth Israel last year, they felt they had no other choice.

“Employees left BI,” she said. “But the departures were by no means due to doctors, medical professionals and nurses leaving the hospital in droves. According to an article that appeared today in Crain’s Magazine, as soon as Beth Israel presented its closure plan in October 2023, it terminated the contracts of dozens, if not hundreds, of doctors. On the nurses and non-physician medical staff side, hospital leaders made it clear that the hospital would close and that they planned to effectively shut down BI by July 12.”

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

“These (union) employees, nurses, physician assistants, orderlies, etc., were scheduled to attend ‘job fairs,’ sometimes held twice a week, almost immediately after the (closure) plan was submitted,” she said. “At these ‘fairs,’ job openings at other hospitals in the Mount Sinai Hospital System were advertised. … It was obvious to everyone that BI was not going to be deterred from closing completely on July 12 … This made the job fairs quite important to the nurses and BI staff; there were job openings, but it was unclear how long the positions would be held open. Everyone had to pick a job; if an employee didn’t choose one, they had no job when BI closed.”

Dr. Kimberly Murdaugh also filed an affidavit opposing the closure, noting that the state Department of Health approved an earlier closure plan for Beth Israel in 2017 that was based on building a replacement 70-bed mini-hospital that would accommodate 70,000 patients per year.

In contrast, she said, “the Department of Health has now approved Mount Sinai’s plan to close the existing hospital entirely, leaving only a few measly crumbs.”

The Beth Israel doctor said that while Mount Sinai has pledged to provide $20 million to Bellevue Hospital to expand its emergency department, the funds are actually being spread over three years and are therefore “inadequate.”

Murdaugh also expressed concern about another element of Mount Sinai’s redevelopment plan – the creation of an urgent care center on the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary campus on East 14th Street.

“The timing of the opening of a promised new urgent care center … and the duration of its operation jeopardize Lower Manhattan residents’ access to immediate care,” she said.

Emergency care must operate around the clock – but only in the first three months.

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

Mount Sinai argues that Beth Israel has been losing $18 million a month, making it economically unviable to continue operating. Opponents, however, accuse Mount Sinai of deliberately “sabotaging” Beth Israel’s finances in recent years by outsourcing medical departments to other hospitals with the goal of selling the hospital’s lucrative real estate, which sits right next to Stuyvesant Square Park.

“After acquiring BIMC (Beth Israel Medical Center),” Kiely said, “MSHS quickly began removing services from Beth Israel Hospital and moving them to Mount Sinai Hospital, the network’s flagship facility on the Upper East Side, or Mount Sinai West in Midtown West. The services removed included cardiac surgery, obstetrics, newborn care, pediatrics, substance abuse and rehabilitation.

“Specifically, in October 2015, MSHS de-licensed 31 drug addiction beds. In August 2016, MSHS de-licensed 26 rehabilitation beds. In July 2017, MSHS de-licensed 25 pediatric beds, 31 neonatal beds, 42 delivery beds, and all cardiac surgery. In October 2019, MSHS converted 5 surgical beds to pediatric intensive care beds and then transferred them to MSH. In March 2020, MSHS de-licensed 38 psychiatric and drug addiction beds, and after Mount Sinai Behavioral Health Center (on Rivington Street) opens in 2023, MSHS will move 115 drug and psychiatric beds to the newly opened facility.

“During the same period,” Kiely said, “net patient service revenue at BIMC immediately began to suffer, declining rapidly from $1,126,499,000 in 2012 to $725,430,000 in 2020, according to BIMC’s audited financial statements. This was not due to reduced demand, but rather due to a decline in revenue-generating services, particularly the cardiac, maternity, neonatal and pediatric surgery departments.”

Attorney Schwartz specifically called on other Beth Israel employees to step forward and give their testimony about the controversial hospital and the plans for its forced closure.

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