Patients May Languish For Years In NYC Hospitals Because No Place Else To Go - Roosevelt Island Goldwater Hospital Patients Will Be Moved In Next Two Years But Not Because Of Cornell Technion Engineering School Says Mayor Bloomberg

The NY Times reported yesterday:

Hundreds of patients have been languishing for months or even years in New York City hospitals, despite being well enough to be sent home or to nursing centers for less-expensive care, because they are illegal immigrants or lack sufficient insurance or appropriate housing.

As a result, hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in unreimbursed expenses annually while the patients, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, are sometimes deprived of services that could be provided elsewhere at a small fraction of the cost....

An example from Roosevelt Island's Coler Goldwater Hospital:

... One patient, a former hospital technician from Queens, has lived at the city’s Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility on Roosevelt Island for 13 years because the hospital has no place to send him, Ms. Brown said. The patient, who is in his mid-60s, has been there since an arterial disease cost him part of one leg below the knee and left him in a wheelchair. The city’s public health system declined to provide the names of any long-term patients or make them available for interviews, citing confidentiality laws....

Click here for the entire NY Times article.

This previous post reported on:

... what life is like for some patients at Roosevelt Island's Coler Goldwater Hospital and the attempt by others to obtain independent living outside of the hospital...

and here's a video showing how some patients live at Coler Goldwater.



The NY Post reported:

The city’s hospital system has promised to empty Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island within two years to make way for the new graduate engineering campus envisioned by Mayor Bloomberg — and now it’s scrambling to find places for more than 500 long-term patients....

and:

... The HHC said it will make room at Coler Hospital at the north end of Roosevelt Island, at three other long-term facilities it operates, in community housing, or at new apartments it might build on land at Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem.

“By the end of 2013, the capacity of Coler, Goldwater North and other HHC long-term care facilities will be adequate to meet the needs of our long-term [Goldwater] patients,” said HHC spokeswoman Evelyn Hernandez.

One person involved in the process said that would require a herculean effort.
“It seems unlikely,” said the source. “At the least, this is a really ambitious target date given how far they’ve gotten so far.”

Click here for the entire NY Post article.

During the Press Conference announcing Cornell/Technion being selected to build the NYC Applied Sciences and Engineering School at the Roosevelt Island Goldwater Hospital campus site, Mayor Bloomberg was asked about what will happen to current patients. Mayor Bloomberg said that the closing of Goldwater Hospital was planned for a long time and had nothing to do with the NYC Applied Sciences and Engineering School being located on Roosevelt Island. Here's what he had to say.



Roosevelt Island Doctor Jack Resnick reported on ways to provide independence and treatment for some patients at home rather than in hospitals in this previous post.