LICH is just one battle in the war to save Brooklyn hospitals, say protestors
Rallies and protests in support of keeping Long Island College Hospital (LICH) open continued this week, but LICH wasn’t the only hospital represented. Protest signs, banners and chants also called for the saving of Interfaith Medical Center and even SUNY Downstate Medical Center – all three hospitals serving as cornerstones of the Brooklyn hospital system and key resources to their respective communities in Brooklyn Heights/Cobble Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Flatbush.
“We have the same administrators, so what they’re doing to LICH, they’re going to do to us as well, closing and possibly downsizing. We see it as the same fight,” said one registered nurse from SUNY Downstate, who wished to remain anonymous in order to safeguard her job.
“We’ve been on a hiring freeze for a couple of years and are just cut to the bone in there,” she added, noting that patients – some of them very sick – have been transferred to SUNY Downstate from LICH following the virtual closure of LICH’s emergency room on June 20. “I’m very worried because it seems like so far [health care] reform favors big companies. . . it is putting hospitals like LICH and SUNY at risk.”