GRAMERCY — The president of Mount Sinai Beth Israel announced this week that she will resign, just as the hospital moves forward on a plan to spend $500 million downsizing and shifting its services to other facilities.
Mount Sinai Health System released new details on its plan to close Beth Israel and replace it with a new "Mount Sinai Downtown Network," which would include a smaller Beth Israel on East 14th Street and a network of ambulatory care facilities and physicians offices.
►READ ALSO: Beth Israel Hospital Will Close Over the Next Four Years
Buried in a press release detailing the next steps of the plan was an announcement that Beth Israel President Susan Somerville will not be leading the hospital into its future. Somerville, who has run Beth Israel since 2014, will stay on as long as it takes to find a new president, according to a hospital spokeswoman. The hospital did not give a reason for her resignation.
The transition will include the shifting of many of Beth Israel’s services to other Mount Sinai facilities in Manhattan over the next 18 months:
► Beth Israel’s cardiac surgery program will move to Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, on the Upper West side, but Beth Israel will continue to treat patients at its 24-hour catheterization lab and will still be able to provide emergency treatment to heart-attack and stroke patients.
► Joint replacement services will move to Mount Sinai West, on the Upper West Side, in 2017 and inpatient head and neck surgery, neurosurgery, colorectal and surgical oncology will relocate to a not-yet specified Mount Sinai facility in 2017 or 2018.
Demolition on the site of the new hospital on the southeast corner of East 14th Street and Second Avenue is set to begin in early 2017 and construction on the new, smaller hospital will likely begin in 2018, according to a statement. The site is currently occupied by Mount Sinai's New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.
Construction is almost complete on a new lobby at the health system’s ambulatory care facility at Union Square East and East 14th Street and over the next year, the facility will expand to include an urgent care center to take on some of the services that are currently provided at Beth Israel, according to a spokeswoman.
That expansion is expected to be completed by mid-2017, and services at the site will include endoscopy, disease management programs and a respiratory institute.
Mount Sinai will also be expanding its Cancer Center West facility at 325 W. 15th St., between Eighth and Ninth avenues, to include a new women's cancer center. It will be renamed Mount Sinai Downtown Chelsea Center, and will provide breast cancer, gynecology oncology services and expanded mammography services.
It was not immediately clear how the transition to the new network will affect non-union employees, but so far 150 union employees at Beth Israel have accepted new jobs at equal pay elsewhere in the network, according to a spokeswoman.
The transition will take place under new leadership. Somerville, who has lead the financially-troubled hospital for the past two and a half years, will stay on during the search for a new president at which point she will step down in order to “pursue new opportunities out East” on Long Island, where she and her husband own a home, according to a statement.
Local officials have expressed concern about the plans, which fit a larger trend of hospital downsizing in lower Manhattan.
The plan — which Mount Sinai touts as an investment and “transformation” — will mean fewer than a quarter of the outpatient beds currently available at Beth Israel, according to hospital officials. In all, the new network will provide 200 beds, with just 70 beds planned for the new Beth Israel hospital building.
The current Beth Israel hospital, which has posted millions of dollars in losses over the past five years, has 750 inpatient beds. Officials told DNAinfo in May that just 60 percent of those beds are filled on an average day. But that average is still two times as many beds the organization expects to provide throughout the new network.
