SUNY Downstate, which took over the failing hospital in 2011 and wants to close it, is locked in a legal stalemate with unions representing hospital workers. The unions, which represent nurses and other workers, say the hospital is desperately needed by the community and they, along with some doctors, have gone to court to stop the shutdown. When the hospital's existence was threatened in the past, the state stepped in with a plan to save it. But now that states are still recovering from the economic downturn, and hospitals are under pressure to cut costs, no one has come forward this time, and the hospital may be doomed.
SUNY is now taking its most aggressive action yet, issuing another closing plan, ordering doctors to discharge remaining patients within a day or two and warning doctors to expect termination letters. The hospital's grim fate illustrates how health care is changing in New York and in the country, as hospitals confront seismic changes in patient care and how it is financed.
With its dwindling patient population, the huge red brick building in Cobble Hill stands on the border of Brooklyn Heights, with sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline that make it more valuable as a real estate development site than as a medical center. The emergency room is open, but has orders to send patients in need of hospital beds elsewhere. There is only one baby in the neonatal intensive care unit meant for 38; one patient in adult intensive care; 10 patients in general medicine; and none in the cardiac unit, pediatrics, psychiatry, surgery or other mainstay areas of hospital care.
"It's a ghost town," Dr. Judith Weinstock, a gynecologist who has worked at the hospital for 30 years, said this week, wandering through the empty corridors and elevators, never encountering a single patient.
For over 150 years, Long Island College Hospital has ministered to the north Brooklyn neighborhoods overlooking New York Harbor and the Statue of Liberty, standing firm as Brando-esque dockworkers gave way to Wall Streeters and other affluent young professionals.
If it were a private hospital, Long Island College Hospital probably would have also declared bankruptcy by now. But because it is run by a government entity, it cannot.
The hospital is losing $15 million a month, $12 million of it in payroll, with almost no money coming in. State officials said they expected to cover the losses through advances on federal financing given to hospitals with large numbers of poor and uninsured patients.
News of the imminent closing prompted public officials, including the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, and a rival mayoral candidate, Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, to decry the decision. But they offered little in the way of concrete solutions.
Matt Wing, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, said the hospital was losing money despite "significant support from state taxpayers." Now, he said, what the community needs is "new sustainable health care."
A few dozen longtime patients and nurses stood outside the hospital on Thursday afternoon, holding protest signs.
Julie Semente, a nurses' union representative for the hospital and an intensive care nurse, said she had been sitting with several colleagues amid empty beds when she began receiving a cascade of calls from different units of the hospital, saying they had been told to shut down. The operating room staff said they were told to complete the day's operations, then cancel all operations for the rest of the month. The endoscopy lab told her that they had been informed that after the end of the business day on Friday, "the lab no longer exists."
"We were a premium medical facility," she said. "SUNY is trying to euthanize this hospital."
Vivian Yee contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: July 19, 2013
A picture caption with an earlier version of this article misspelled the name of a gynecologist who works at Long Island College Hospital. As the article correctly noted, she is Dr. Judith Weinstock, not Weinstein.
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