By Yepoka Yeebo
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Downtown emergency rooms are picking up the slack after St Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village was closed in April, according to figures in the Wall Street Journal.
Emergency room visits at Bellevue Hospital Center, Beth Israel Medical Center, New York Downtown Hospital and New York University Langone Medical Center increased by up to 30 percent in comparison to May 2008. Figures from 2008 were used rather than 2009 because of the effect swine flu scare had on emergency admissions last year.
"We don't know the outcomes of people who actually need emergency care, who have to go a longer distance to get that emergency care," State Senator Tom Duane, a Democrat who lives in Chelsea, told the Journal.
"It would be better to have emergency care accessible 24/7 as close to where people in the lower West Side live and work."
Emergency surgeries have increased at New York Downtown, for example, forcing them to move non-urgent elective surgeries to slots as late as 8 p.m., the paper reported.
