Brooklyn prosecutors are investigating whether SUNY Downstate officials should be sent to prison for nearly closing down the emergency room at Long Island College Hospital.
The district attorney’s office’s Rackets Division launched the probe Tuesday on the recommendation of Brooklyn Supreme Court Judge Johnny Lee Baynes, said Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for District Attorney Charles Hynes.
Earlier in the day, Baynes met with attorneys representing Public Advocate Bill de Blasio who argued LICH’s month-long refusal to admit patients into its emergency room is a violation of state law.
“Any general hospital which fails to provide such treatment shall be guilty of a misdemeanor,” de Blasio wrote in court papers.
Want to publish your own articles on DistilINFO Publications?
Send us an email, we will get in touch with you.
De Blasio is suing SUNY Downstate to keep the agency from closing down the Hicks St. facility.
Patients are not being admitted into LICH’s emergency, intensive care, and surgical units. Officials said they can’t afford to maintain a health care facility that is losing $15 million a month.
There were only 11 patients in the hospital’s 250 beds Tuesday, while there were 80 nurses on-duty, Downstate spokesman Robert Bellafiore said.
“We’ve lost dozens of attending physicians since January,” he said. “We have not been admitting patients through the emergency room because we don’t have (doctors) on the floor to treat them.”
Date: July 23, 2013