Late last week, the impasse over the hospital's fate appeared to crack in favor of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, which took over the hospital in 2011 and is now trying to shut it down. On Friday, the State Department of Health said that SUNY Downstate could move forward with its closing plan. But opponents quickly secured a temporary restraining order, and on Saturday contended that SUNY Downstate had violated the order by trying to transfer patients and diverting ambulances.
SUNY Downstate countered by filing a motion to appeal on Saturday, a move that, according to SUNY, automatically stayed Friday's restraining order. Yet opponents insisted that the restraining order was still in effect pending a court hearing; they plan to appear before a State Supreme Court justice on Monday morning.
"SUNY continues to try every trick in the book to keep closing down operations here; they've been a bad actor throughout this process," Bill de Blasio, the public advocate and a Democratic candidate for mayor, said outside the hospital on Sunday afternoon. "We're going to fight SUNY with every tool we have," added Mr. De Blasio, who obtained Friday's restraining order. "They've violated the law. We've stood by the law. And we're going to win the day."
Doctors and nurses said they twice saw SUNY Downstate representatives trying to transfer some of the hospital's 11 remaining patients on Saturday, including three critically ill patients who had been in the intensive care unit for months. Other staff members and a resident of the neighborhood said they saw patients being loaded onto stretchers and taken out of the hospital on Saturday night and early Sunday. The staff said they prevented the transfers by calling the police to enforce the restraining order.
"This is an attempt to be in complete defiance of the law," Linda O'Neil, a longtime nurse at the hospital, said on Saturday. "We will be calling 911 every hour if we have to."
But a spokesman for SUNY Downstate, Steven Greenberg, said on Sunday that no attempts had been made to move patients on Saturday. And a Police Department spokesman said that while officers were stationed at the hospital to keep order, no officers had taken any action related to the court order.
"If people want to mischaracterize the truth, I suppose they're entitled to do so," Mr. Greenberg said. "The truth is, SUNY continues to work with our regulator, the State Department of Health, in an orderly way to ensure patient safety. That has been our goal throughout, that continues to be our goal, and I'm not going to comment on falsehoods put forward by others."
Doctors and nurses who continue to staff the near-empty hospital have complained of seeing their medical resources go to waste, as longtime patients sought to be admitted, only to be turned away, and ambulances were forced to bypass the emergency room.
Dr. Bella Kushnir, and other doctors on the hospital staff, said that a woman who had long come to Long Island College Hospital for dialysis treatments became unresponsive during a treatment last Tuesday. She said that she and other doctors were not allowed to admit her. Instead, she was transferred to SUNY Downstate, where, according to Dr. Kushnir and another member of the staff, she died.
"So while the patient is critical and ill, while we had all the I.C.U. doctors on board, we were not able to help her," Dr. Kushnir said.
The cause of the woman's death was not immediately clear.
When asked about the patient, another spokesman for SUNY Downstate, Robert Bellafiore, said, "Unlike your sources, we respect and adhere to federal laws protecting patient privacy and thus will not comment."
For all the protests, it was difficult to deny that the Department of Health had brought the hospital closer to the end with its approval on Friday. Unless a court halts the closing, the state's approval will allow SUNY Downstate to end admissions to the hospital from its emergency room and all elective operations by noon on Monday, and to close its emergency room and discharge the hospital's 11 remaining patients by next week.
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