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Residents criticize change in plan for former Long Beach Medical Center property

Call on elected officials to push South Nassau for original project and more services

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Long Beach residents called on members of the City Council and other elected officials at Tuesday’s council meeting to push South Nassau Communities Hospital to stick to its initial plan of building a new emergency room and medical facility, after hospital officials said the project was too costly.
South Nassau acquired the Long Beach Medical Center in 2014 following a bankruptcy proceeding. The sale was finalized after South Nassau reached an agreement with the Federal Emergency Management Agency to accept $154 million in disaster relief funds originally earmarked for LBMC after Hurricane Sandy to redevelop health care services in Long Beach and to expand South Nassau’s Ocean-side campus.
As the Herald reported last month, hospital officials determined that construction of a 25,000-square-foot medical arts pavilion with an emergency department would be too costly and far exceed the $40 million in FEMA funds that SNCH earmarked to build on what remains of the medical center’s main and west wings on East Bay Drive. Those buildings will now remain vacant for five to 10 years, with officials saying that the hospital envisions eventually bringing in a private developer to build an assisted-living facility.
Tuesday’s meeting was held just hours after South Nassau and the Mt. Sinai Health System announced a partnership. South Nassau officials said last month that the affiliation played no role in the change to the Long Beach project.
A number of residents, many of whom wore red at the meeting in a show of solidarity, maintain that six years after Sandy closed LBMC, the barrier island remains without adequate health care services. They expressed concern about the services that would be provided under the revised plan, and said that South Nassau officials reneged on a promise to build a “robust” structure that would house a state-of-the-art emergency department that could accept ambulances.

“Accessibility to health care — right now we don’t have that because the hospital no longer exists,” resident James Kirkland said. “The facility that South Nassau promised us is no longer being enhanced as they originally said it would be. It’s unfortunate that our leaders didn’t stick up for us.”
But South Nassau officials disputed those claims after the meeting, and said that the hospital remains committed to building the medical arts pavilion, albeit in a different location on the property. The freestanding emergency department built in 2015 would continue to operate 24 hours a day, they explained, and accept ambulances. They added that the emergency department has been a success, and that South Nassau remains committed to moving forward with the construction of a 15,000-square-foot, elevated one-story pavilion.
And though it would no longer house the emergency room, hospital officials said that the pavilion would still provide the services proposed in the original plan. It would include 18 exams rooms and two procedure rooms, providing primary care and internal medicine, geriatrics, cardiology, pediatrics, radiology and other subspecialty services. It would also accommodate a lab, imaging services and treatment rooms. It would not, however, treat dialysis patients.
Officials insisted that the project would “reinvigorate” the vacated site and create hundreds of health care and construction jobs.
“South Nassau’s commitment to Long Beach and to the residents of the barrier island has not changed,” Joseph Fennessy, the hospital’s chairman of the board, wrote in a recent op-ed in the Herald. “The hospital has invested more than $38 million to date in an effort to restore needed emergency services there, using a combination of its own resources, FEMA funds and New York State Department of Health grants.”
South Nassau is set to hold a public information session on Dec. 12 at the Long Beach Public Library to discuss its plans.
Still, more than 50 residents, many of them members of the Beach to Bay Civic Associationa group that has advocated for more medical services than those proposed by SNCH — turned out at Tuesday’s meeting, and called on elected officials to push South Nassau to move forward with the original plan and invest in more medical services.
School Board President Dr. Dennis Ryan said that students were being “shortchanged.” “Whatever plans are there, they are far, far short of what our children need,” he said. “I don’t think you people have done enough.”
Council President Anthony Eramo said that the state Health Department would ultimately have to approve the facility. “After Superstorm Sandy, the City Council has done everything in its power to obtain the medical services we feel we so desperately need,” Eramo said. “We’ve actively advocated to the state Department of Health and South Nassau, and met with our neighbors on numerous occasions to hear their collective concerns.”
Some residents said that the current emergency department, located in a parking lot on East Bay Drive, was initially intended to be a temporary facility. But they also noted that it does not accept ambulances via 911 with patients suffering from certain “time-critical” medical conditions, who are taken to Oceanside, which they said remains an issue in a “geographically isolated” community like Long Beach.
“I never found the medical pavilion to be a viable alternative to a small hospital,” resident Kathleen O’Leary said.
Others disagreed. Resident June Schecter said that the initial proposal by South Nassau seemed reasonable. She and others said that what remains of the vacant Long Beach Medical Center buildings has become a blight on the community. “The former plan . . . seemed like it was a state-of-the-art emergency center,” she said. “South Nassau accepted FEMA money to provide those services, and I would like to have them held accountable. I would implore South Nassau to make good on its previous plans and renovate the structure, giving us essential medical and emergency care.”
The existing emergency department, South Nassau officials said, is more than capable of stabilizing and treating patients: 87 percent are treated and released without having to be transferred to Oceanside. Those who require hospital admission or advanced treatment are transported by ambulance to South Nassau or another facility.
The hospital also operates a family- medicine practice on the site, and in August, officials announced that Dr. Lee Weitzman, a Long Beach-based physician who has been practicing cardiology and internal medicine for 34 years, had joined South Nassau to improve and expand local cardiovascular-health and primary-care services.
SNCH’s plans still call for an emergency staging area on the site that can be used to transport patients by helicopter, officials said, as well as a boat ramp and dock for emergency access.
“Our plan for the former Long Beach Medical Center site is a medical campus,” said Joe Calderone, SNCH’s senior vice president of corporate communications and development.