Can Anything Resuscitate Brooklyn’s Ailing Hospitals?

Kim Velsey, New York Observer real estate editor, talks about Brooklyn’s severely distressed healthcare system. This year, Long Island College Hospital was shuttered—only the vestige of an emergency room remains. Another hospital, Interfaith, was saved from the same fate by emergency funding from the state, given with the understanding that its closure would have disastrous consequences for the surrounding Bedford-Stuyvesant community. A state report from 2011 identified at least three other Brooklyn hospitals “at risk of imminent financial collapse.” The report advised major changes: multiple mergers and the creation of a vast outpatient network across the borough, recommendations that have gone almost entirely unheeded in the past three years. Her article “A Nice Place to Live, but I Wouldn’t Want to Get Sick There” is in the July 16 New York Observer.