A Greenwich Village Institution, St. Vincent’s Closes Its Doors
CIR Mobilizes to Protect Resident Physicians During Hospital’s Final Days
A fixture in Greenwich Village in Manhattan for over 161 years, St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Center in Manhattan closed its doors in April 2010. Although there can be no mollifying the heartbreak of those who worked in its halls or the continued health access crisis for the local community, the 370 resident physicians employed by the hospital took comfort in knowing that they had the staff and leadership of CIR on their side and looking out for their interests throughout the hospital’s months-long decline.
St. Vincent’s has served as the only Level 1 Trauma Center on the West Side of Manhattan below West 59th Street as well as an invaluable birthing center specializing in neonatal care. It had provided care for the victims of the Titanic and 9/11. But the hospital’s descent into bankruptcy was the conclusion of years of financial instability and poor management choices by successive administrations, exacerbated by the economic recession. In early January 2010, the New York Post broke the story that St. Vincent’s was in talks to sell the hospital, and that the new buyer planned to operate an outpatient community health center on the site, closing the rest of the hospital’s operations. Although that plan was ultimately scrapped, a new, more severe option took its place: bankruptcy and the closure of the hospital.
On January 28, a mere two days after the NY Post story initially broke, local elected officials and sister-union 1199 SEIU staged a rally at Our Lady of Pompei Church in Greenwich Village. Dr. Angela Ferguson, a PGY 2 in Internal Medicine and Dr. Jay Mathur, also a PGY 2 in Internal Medicine told the stories of patients they treated during home visits in the neighborhood or within the clinics who lack the mobility to travel across town for care. At a subsequent rally in February at the Manhattan office of SEIU 32BJ, Dr. Xavier Jimenez, a PGY 2 in Psychiatry, stressed the urgency of the problem and the need for local government to stand up for the hospital.
“This is an emergency,” Dr. Jimenez told the crowd. “In an emergency, the nurse doesn’t leave, the doctor doesn’t leave in that situation; neither should the government.”
A hospital’s last days can be chaotic. While serving the needs of patients, health care workers were also inundated with rumors about the hospital’s fate and often had trouble determining fact from fiction. To combat the uncertainty and get advance notice on potential fallout from the crisis, CIR devoted a special section to its website to provide the latest verifiable information and answers to frequently asked questions. At the height of the crisis, that web page was visited hundreds of times per day.
Housestaff were particularly vulnerable to the crumbling finances of the hospital, and thankful to have CIR staff on their side. When residents received eviction notices on apartments in Jersey City that they subleased at a subsidized rate from St. Vincent’s, CIR’s legal team quickly determined the cause of the problem and ensured the housestaff could stay in their homes. With wide variation in the response of program directors on the imperative of finding new positions for residents when St. Vincent’s announced the June 30 voluntary withdrawal, CIR created and constantly updated a list of open residency slots at other CIR hospitals and across the country.
Even with the hospital’s closure, CIR continued to keep watch for a host of potential problems stemming from the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings, including ensuring that housestaff with apartments in Staff House in Greenwich Village would be allowed to stay in their homes until the end of the residency year, and making sure that St. Vincent’s was abiding by its agreement to pay residents for a set number of weeks once the hospital closed. CIR is also closely monitoring the bankruptcy proceedings with an eye towards St. Vincent’s medical malpractice trust fund, as the potential for residents to continue to be exposed to litigation years after the hospital’s closure is of grave concern.
In a chaotic and tragic set of circumstances, CIR members had the security of knowing someone was advocating for them in their hour of need.