By Howard Koplowitz
Borough President Helen Marshall called on state health officials to hold an emergency meeting after Peninsula Hospital said Monday it is deep in debt and may have to close.
The Far Rockaway hospital owes about $13 million to vendors and is “reconciling” how much it owes to it’s union benefit fund.
“Without a long-term solution that puts Peninsula Hospital on the path to fiscal recovery, an organized closure may be the only option,” the hospital said in a statement.
If Peninsula closes, it means there will only be one hospital in the Rockaways: St. John’s Episcopal Hospital in Far Rockaway.
“Peninsula will be the fourth hospital to close in Queens in less than a decade. It comes at a time when unprecedented new housing and infrastructure improvements are being built and it puts the future in peril for approximately 1,000 [Peninsula] employees,” Marshall said in a statement.
Marshall said she does not see how St. John’s can accommodate all of the Rockaway’s health care needs.
“I cannot imagine how St. John’s Episcopal Hospital — the only other hospital on the peninsula — will be able to handle the overcrowding in the emergency room that will take place as a result of this closing,” she said. “We have already seen the effect on surrounding hospitals when St. John’s [in Elmhurst] and Mary Immaculate [in Jamaica] hospitals closed.
“Once again, Queens will now lose more beds and the bleeding of Queens’ hospitals will continue,” Marshall said. “We will be monitoring the closure plan for Peninsula closely and its exact impact on patients and staff. The future of the site will also be a major issue in days to come. A medical facility must be a component of any plan for future use of the area.”
In 2006, the Commission on Health Care Facilities in the 21st Century, also known as the Berger Commission, recommended that Peninsula and St. John’s merge into a 400-bed inpatient facility that also provides emergency, psychiatric and ambulatory care.
“The optimal solution to meet the health care needs of the Rockaways is the establishment and construction of one new hospital,” the report said.
Marshall said a series of meetings took place before the Berger recommendations and an agreement was negotiated last year that allowed hundreds of hospital workers to keep their health benefits.
The commission said the two hospitals did not run at full capacity at that time, but neither could absorb the other’s patients. It also said the staffs at Peninsula and St. John’s overlap and both hospitals were old facilities in need of an upgrade.
But the panel said barriers to their recommendations existed because of an “apparent unwillingness by either of the providers to merge or consolidate” and the cost of erecting a new facility, which was pegged at $1 million per bed.
Reach reporter Howard Koplowitz by e-mail at hkoplowitz@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4573.
