By Amy Zimmer
DNAinfo News Editor
MANHATTAN — The prison ward at Bellevue Hospital is heading uptown.
Bellevue’s correctional facility treating male inmates who require psychiatric or medical treatment will be relocated to Metropolitan Hospital Center, HHC officials said. The women’s prison facility at Elmhurst Hospital Center will be moved there, too. The relocations are part of a restructuring plan by the Health and Hospitals Corporation to contain costs.
The plan to consolidate prison services inside Metropolitan, located on First Avenue at East 97th Street, will save the city’s public hospital system an estimated $4.6 million, HHC officials said. It's one of many proposals aimed at cutting $600 million and 10 percent of the staff from the network, which is facing a $1.2 billion deficit.
"The relocation is in the planning stages and will not go into effect for at least two years," said HHC President Alan D. Aviles. "The plan is to move the 102-bed unit at Bellevue and the 14-bed unit at Elmhurst into one forensic unit at Metropolitan Hospital for a target revenue increase of $4.6 million a year.
"The move will free up more beds for acute care services at Bellevue and Elmhurst," he continued, "to accommodate the increased demand resulting from a number of hospital closings in Manhattan and Queens."
The freed-up space will create additional need revenue-generating capacity in the two hospitals, according to HHC's four-year restructuring plan released last year.
The number of patients coming to Bellevue’s ER spiked nearly 25 percent in the aftermath of St. Vincent’s Medical Center closure in the West Village. But the swell has abated, according to Bellevue spokesman Steve Bohlen.
Bohlen said the hospital's emergency room is now down to approximately 4 percent more patients in the ER than the same period in 2009.
Yet, on four days in November, the hospital was forced to transfer some patients to Metropolitan after they were already triaged at Bellevue.
"It was a one-time response to a particular situation," Bohlen said. "[Patients] were given the opportunity and chose to be transferred to Metropolitan Hospital. The system worked to everyone’s satisfaction. In the unlikely event that we would need to rely on it again, we know that it works."
Some police suspects have already started to be treated at Metropolitan Hospital. Attempted-murder suspect Miguel Padilla, 44, who was charged with shooting a 13-year-old boy in a fight over a parking space in a Harlem garage, was initially taken to Metropolitan Hospital but then was brought to Bellevue, police said. Bellevue’s correctional facility has an elaborate system of security guards and restricted access points.
Bellevue’s tight security, however, has had some famous lapses that resulted in amazing escapes.
Captain Fritz Joubert Duquesne — a South African Boer soldier, journalist and German spy during both world wars— was awaiting extradition to England in Bellevue’s prison ward in 1919 when, after two years of pretending to be paralyzed, he dressed as a woman and escaped by cutting the bars of his cell and then leaping over two walls nearly 7-feet high.
William Guillermo Morales, a purported member of a Puerto Rican terrorist group FALN — Armed Forces of National Liberation of Puerto Rico — who lost his fingers when a bomb he was making blew up, managed to escape from Bellevue’s prison ward where he was being held while being fitted for artificial hands. In May 1979, he somehow eluded the guards in his third floor room and climbed down using an elastic bandage he dangled outside a window and wasn’t recaptured until four years later.
