Friday, March 6, 2015

Cobble Hill's new state of the art ER

(c) Joshua Bright
For several years the community fought hard to preserve Long Island College Hospital. Despite the backing of our local elected officials, the Governor continued and shuttered the gates of our area's health care in the name of future development. The neighborhood no longer has a fully functioning hospital. There is no denying that.

However, we do have some new facilities for health care service now operated in a brand new, state of the art free-standing ER run by New York University's Langone Medical Center. Several members of the Cobble Hill Association and neighboring community groups got a private tour of the ER recently and learned many great things like the incredibly short door-to-doctor time window they have to get patients seen quickly.

Now NYU is rolling out even more details to the general public. Below please find a list of all the services NYU Langone - Cobble Hill offers so that you and your loved ones can make informed decisions when choosing your health care. Perhaps the biggest item to note is that as a free-standing ER, there are no beds for these top tier doctors to admit patients. They instead focus on a system of "Treat, Stabilize, then Transfer" to a nearby hospital that allows for patient intake.

Also worth pointing out the mention that the receives both walk-in patients and those arriving by private or FDNY 911 ambulance is not 100% accurate yet. NYU needs state permission to accept FDNY ambulance. They claim "we made a request weeks ago for the State to allow us to receive “critical” ambulances; we are awaiting their decision. We continue to care for critically ill patients who arrive by other means."

And though it should go without saying, please know in a true emergency... always call 911.




(c) Joshua Bright

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I had a medical emergency last Wed night and walked myself into that ER (i live a block away) and it was a fantastic experience (if anything requiring an ER can be considered fantastic). Within 5 minutes of entering the building I was in a bed, with an IV and hooked up to monitoring. There were 4 people standing over me working like a well-oiled machine doing registration, triage and treatment all at once and every single one of them was efficient and professional, yet friendly and warm and going out of their way to make me comfortable and calm. There was a chance that I was having a heart attack (i didn't) so urgency was to be expected, but this was like no ER visit I've ever had. I was kept overnight for observation and transferred via ambulance to NYU Langone's main Tisch Hospital in the city (my preferred hospital already and where most of my own Dr's are based) early in the morning for a cardiac echo and a stress test.

Compare that to the 2 LICH ER visits I had over the past 18 years, one of which I left AMA 6 hours later, despite profuse hemorrhaging because I was being treated so horrifically (when I wasn't being ignored) and another of which I spent 7 hours waiting, in agony, in a chair - because there were no beds available - for a Dr to even see me and no one would even give me a non-narcotic pain reliever until a Dr saw me (turned out to be a kidney stone).

amy said...

4 people tending to you the minute you walk in the door is nice. Either not very many other patients were there & the workers had time to spend on you or they have the kind of staffing levels that every real hospital is refusing to provide

Luca said...

I recently went to the emergency for what I thought was a simple procedure: I had a tick bite and wanted a doctor to look at it and prescribe the required antibiotic. Very nice staff but they had no idea what to do with a tick bite. After trying with a pair of tweezers to remove a small fragment stuck in my skin I was given the antibiotic and left. Weeks later I received the bill: $3,860...
I am fighting it with my insurance; NYU response so far has been that if you enter an ER these are the charges to expect. Not true, I had visited the same ER when LICH was in operation and the charges were $270.
My advice is to stay away from this ER facility unless you have life threatening injuries. And to be honest I don't think this type of opaque and predatory practice belongs to this neighborhood.