Civic leaders plead to state; Give us ER in Bay Ridge!
While Long Island College Hospital is fighting against the odds for survival, the medical situation in southwest Brooklyn is also in critical condition, according to a group of community leaders. The lack of an emergency room in the area is forcing patients to seek care at hospitals in other neighborhoods that are already overburdened, the leaders charged. “Patients wait to be treated for hours and hours,” Bill Guarinello, chairman of Community Board 11, said.
Guarinello and other members of Board 11, representing Bensonhurst, were joined by their colleagues from Community Board 10 (Bay Ridge – Dyker Heights) and elected officials at a press conference in Bay Ridge on March 8 to demand that the New York State Department of Health open an emergency room at the site off the former Victory Memorial Hospital at 699 92nd St. The hospital closed in 2010. The State University of New York Downstate Medical Center runs an http://www.downstate.edu/bayridge/ urgent care center at the Victory site. But an urgent care center, which treats non-emergencies, is not the same as an emergency room, Guarinello and the others charged.
Hospitals like Maimonides Medical Center in Borough Park and Lutheran Medical Center in Sunset Park do a great job, but are so overrun with emergency room cases that patients wind up waiting for long periods of time to be diagnosed and treated, Guarinello said. “In the United States of America in 2013, our residents should not be going to MASH types of emergency rooms,” he said. “The emergency rooms are a disaster,” he added.