GRAMERCY — Residents worried about the impending downsizing of Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital will get a chance to voice concerns at a community meeting on Thursday hosted by the hospital.
The meeting, scheduled for 6:30 p.m. in the Mason Hall auditorium at Baruch College, will address the details of the hospital’s “transformation” into the Mount Sinai Downtown Network, which will take place over the next four years and shift many of the hospital’s services to ambulatory facilities and urgent care centers across Manhattan.
Mount Sinai has been relatively tight-lipped on the plan since announcing in May its plans to shut down Beth Israel in stages and open a new, significantly smaller facility at East 14th Street and Second Avenue.
It released some details of its plan in a press release earlier this month. In the same release, it noted that Beth Israel's president Susan Somerville, will be stepping down.
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.
Mount Sinai is investing $500 million in the new network, and has touted it as a step forward for hospital care in Manhattan. But the downsizing will result in dramatically fewer available inpatient beds — from a total of 750 beds currently available at Beth Israel to a total of 200 beds spread across the network — and require the moving of some services to hospitals elsewhere in the borough.
Mount Sinai Beth Israel community forum, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Mason Hall auditorium, Baruch College, 17 Lexington Ave. at East 23rd Street.
