HEALTHY CHOICE?
Activists, hosp clash over $1B plan to rebuild E. Side facility
The state’s largest health system shouldn’t be focused on rebuilding a big Upper East Side hospital, say local activists, who point to COVID’s disproportionate impact on communities of color and outer borough residents.
Leaders of Northwell Health say the COVID outbreak proves the opposite — that its at least $1 billion plan to turn aging Lenox Hill Hospital into a cutting-edge facility is more necessary than ever.
The centerpiece of the project is a 26-story tower at Lexington Ave. and 76th St. that would replace some of the site’s decades-old buildings. The hospital’s 450 beds, currently in double-occupancy rooms, would be replaced with 475 beds in individual rooms. There would be new surgical suites, big clinical spaces and a revamped emergency room.
But opponents say the project is aimed at turning the site into a “destination” hospital to rival Mount Sinai and New York-Presbyterian hospitals.
“It appears to me that they want to create ... a luxury hospital that will have private rooms and will be very attractive to the kinds of people that health systems are looking for these days, which are middleor upper-class people who have commercial health insurance that will reimburse the hospital well for the care they provide,” Lois Uttley, of advocacy group Raising Women’s Voices for the Health Care We Need, told the Daily News.
“I would like to see Northwell show its commitment to addressing health inequities by proposing significant investment in areas that are underserved,” she added.
The criticism comes as COVID has killed Hispanic and Black New Yorkers at nearly twice the rate of whites — the COVID death rate is 286.14 per 100,000 Hispanics, 264.54 per 100,000 Black people and 146.78 per 100,000 whites, according to the city Health Department. The outbreak has been deadlier in the outer boroughs than in Manhattan, too.
The disparities have been the subject of intense focus by policymakers, with many pointing out that majority-white Manhattan has more access to hospital beds than the other boroughs. There were 6.4 hospital beds per 1,000 people in Manhattan at the start of the outbreak, according to a Bloomberg News analysis, compared with 1.5 beds in Queens, 2.2 in Brooklyn, 2.5 on Staten Island and 2.7 in the Bronx.
Northwell Health has rejected criticism that upgrading Lenox Hill Hospital will perpetuate inequities, noting about 56% of its patients there are nonwhite and about 50% come from outside
Manhattan, and that the system is also making improvements to some of its sites in the other boroughs.
Northwell Health President and CEO Michael Dowling said, “It’s good for Manhattan to have some of the best facilities,” anyway.
“We have good facilities in Queens, good facilities in Westchester, good facilities in Staten Island, and we assure that Northwell has the best facilities also in Manhattan,” he said. “I don’t buy the argument that it’s one versus the other.”
As part of its case to the community during a heated series of public meetings, Northwell reps have argued that Lenox Hill Hospital is a hodgepodge of aging buildings that don’t meet current demands.
“If you’re going to be successful going forward in the future, you’ve got to continually
improve, upgrade, transform your organization so that your facilities are current and prepared for the future way health care is going to be delivered,” Dowling said.
Grassroots activists aren’t buying it.
While they successfully pushed Northwell Health to scrap a major part of the initial proposal, a 490foot residential tower, they say it will still harm that elusive quality cherished by New Yorkers — the “character of the community.”
The project “would introduce Midtown-level density to the heart of the Upper East Side with potential to impact quality of life and neighborhood character in an unprecedented way,” the Friends of the Upper East Side Historic District stated in November.
Community activist Andrew Gaspar called the plans “outrageous.”
“You can’t do something like that, mammothly out of scale,”
he said. “We’d like a better Lenox Hill; we just don’t need a bigger Lenox Hill.”
The project requires city approval for rezoning to move forward, though Northwell Health has yet to formally start the process.
The City Council ordinarily defers to the Council member repping the district where a rezoning is requested.
“It’s essential that Northwell continue to work with stakeholders to ID solutions that balance their needs to modernize with the legitimate concerns of the community,” said Councilman Keith Powers, a Democrat who represents the Upper East Side. “I’m hopeful and confident that’s possible.”
A Northwell Health rep said the system hopes to start construction in about a year, adding that the project will take up to a decade.