State university trustees will vote this week on whether to close Long Island College Hospital, officials of the Brooklyn hospital said on Tuesday, despite protests from doctors and nurses that northern Brooklyn would lose an essential source of emergency care.
Dr. John Williams, president of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, which runs Long Island College Hospital, said on Tuesday that he would formally recommend closing the hospital at a SUNY meeting in Manhattan on Thursday, followed by a public hearing that same day.
An executive committee of the SUNY board will vote on the recommendation on Friday and is expected to approve it, which would clear the way for the state Health Department to make the final decision, based on whether comparable care is available to people now served by the hospital. About 2,000 doctors, nurses and other employees would be in danger of losing their jobs.
Dr. Williams said that after five months on the job, he had concluded that the financial losses at LICH, as the hospital is called, threatened to sink SUNY Downstate, which includes a medical school that he said had trained one out of three doctors practicing in Brooklyn and one out of nine doctors practicing in New York City.
He said it was necessary to sacrifice LICH to save the rest of the enterprise. "I have to put on the big hat when I look at the campus and say what works and what doesn't work," Dr. Williams said in an interview on Tuesday. "The last thing I want to do is have people lose their jobs, but LICH could bring down SUNY Downstate and that's something I'm trying to prevent."
But doctors — many of whom heard of the plan at a meeting held Monday by Dr. Williams — said that the closing of LICH would leave more than 50,000 emergency room patients a year without a nearby hospital to go to. They accused Dr. Williams of opting to close LICH, which lies in the gentrifying Cobble Hill neighborhood, rather than more antiquated facilities in East Flatbush or Bay Ridge, because it has the most valuable real estate, and the sale could prop up SUNY Downstate's faltering operations.
Dr. Williams said that he had chosen to close LICH, rather than facilities in lower-income areas, because Downstate's mission was to take care of poor and underserved patients. He said that it would cost $75 million to $200 million to upgrade LICH's aging plant. Besides, he said, in recent years, LICH had been largely abandoned by residents of the surrounding neighborhoods of Cobble Hill, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn Heights, Red Hook and Boerum Hill, who often worked in Manhattan and preferred to go to hospitals there, forcing the hospital to reduce its beds.
But Julie Semente, a registered nurse in LICH's intensive care unit, said Tuesday that when it came to emergencies, those patients still went to LICH; Brooklyn ambulances, she said, generally do not go to Manhattan. If LICH closed, she said, they would have to go to hospitals deeper in Brooklyn and farther from their homes and families.
"My patient who was hemorrhaging had to call an ambulance," Ms. Semente said of one recent patient. "He lives in Brooklyn Heights. The ambulance doesn't go over the bridge. It came to Long Island College Hospital and his life was saved because he went to the hospital in the neighborhood."
She said that SUNY Downstate was already "in a mess" financially before acquiring LICH in 2011 from Continuum Health Partners, which also runs St. Luke's, Roosevelt and Beth Israel hospitals in Manhattan. "LICH is being closed because it is more attractive and it will bring them more money in a sale" than other facilities, she said.
The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, said in an audit last month that SUNY Downstate had $117 million in operating losses in 2011, of which $44 million was attributable to the acquisition of LICH. The audit said that LICH had annual operating losses for 17 years going back to 1994. A report in November 2011 by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's panel on Brooklyn hospitals identified LICH as one of six hospitals that "do not have a business model and sufficient margins to remain viable and provide high-quality care to their communities as currently structured."
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