Concerns Continue To Be Raised For Current Goldwater Patients Needing Homes Before Hospital Demolition And Cornell NYC Tech Campus Starts Roosevelt Island Construction

 Image of Goldwater Hospital Patient Armand Xama From DNA Info

Reported previously on concerns for the current patients at Goldwater Hospital who will have to be moved to other locations prior to the demolition of the hospital buildings and start of construction for Cornell NYC Tech campus. From January 4, 2012 post:

... 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.

DNA Info reported today:

The tech campus heralded as making New York City even more cutting edge isn't being celebrated by everyone on Roosevelt Island.

For Armand Xama, 30, a paraplegic injured in a diving accident five years ago, it means he needs to start looking for a new home.

Xama has lived at the island's Goldwater Hospital for nearly two years, but the nursing home and long term rehabilitation center is set to close by December 2013 to make way for Cornell's tech campus.

Xama is worried he'll be put in a nursing home.

Over the next 18 months, roughly 800 patients will be have to be relocated from the 9.9-acre complex on the southern end of Roosevelt Island, built in 1939 as the first public hospital devoted to chronic diseases....

and

... Susan Dooha, executive director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled, acknowledged that many individuals may have special circumstances. Her group will soon be helping Goldwater residents with resources and information, she said.

"Low-income housing is virtually nonexistent," she said, "and people with disabilities, for the most part, don’t qualify for supportive housing,” which is often set aside for people with developmental or psychiatric disabilities.

"To their credit,” she said, “Coler-Goldwater is trying to be creative in finding housing."

She said the closure was “a hugely exciting opportunity” to “help people to return to the community when they really don’t need nursing home-level care or they do, but can be receiving it in the community.”...

Click here for the entire DNA article.

Roosevelt Island's Doctor Jack Resnick, who treats many Goldwater Patients, reported on ways to provide independence and treatment for some patients at home rather than in hospitals in this previous post.

The NY Post reported in December 2011:

... Some 201 patients are supposed to move into beds in the old North General Hospital in Harlem, now being called Goldwater North, which is being renovated. Another 164 are to be relocated to a skilled-nursing facility being built on North General’s parking lot.
But that leaves 516 to be accommodated elsewhere.

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....

In all the excitement over the coming of Cornell NYC Tech, let's not forget that there are currently people living at Goldwater Hospital on Roosevelt Island whose lives will be tremendously disrupted by the new science and engineering school.