Five months after being forced into bankruptcy by the state Department of Health, Interfaith Medical Center in Bedford Stuyvesant is floundering on the shoals of insolvency, running out of cash and drafting both a restructuring and a closure plan, hospital officials confirmed to City Limits on Thursday.
“It’s no question—cash is tight,” acknowledged Interfaith’s CEO and president, Luis Hernandez. In an effort to stay solvent and hold the state Department of Health and the state Dormitory Authority to their promise to keep Interfaith alive, Hernandez and the board of trustees are in the midst of a vast restructuring plan, to be submitted to state DOH some time in the next few weeks that could fundamentally alter how the 287-bed hospital serves the neediest of Central Brooklyn.
At the same time, Interfaith, having filed for bankruptcy, is required by the state Dormitory Authority to draft and file a hospital closure plan—though Hernandez and a hospital spokeswoman, in an interview, stressed that the hospital was focused on restructuring, and still hoped to ultimately merge with Brooklyn Hospital Center in Downtown Brooklyn.
After all, the prospect of that merger was why Interfaith was forced into bankruptcy to begin with.
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The predicament facing Interfaith is a complicated, complex and incredibly vexing situation – for the hospital’s administration, its employees and the residential communities of Central Brooklyn, which make up the hospital’s patient base.
And it’s a remarkably sad turn of events for an institution that a decade ago was nearly $50 million in the black, according to one source, and barely got a passing mention in the first state-wide health care reform working group (known as the Berger Commission, after its panel chair, financier Stephen Berger), which was convened in 2004 and called for massive hospital closures across New York State—13 in New York City alone. At the time, Interfaith was “barely a blip on the screen,” the source recalls.
Date: May 28, 2013