St. Luke’s Hospital quietly shut down its pediatric unit during Hurricane Sandy — using the storm as an excuse to shutter a ward used by low-income families, nurses charge.
The facility, on Amsterdam Avenue and 114th Street in Morningside Heights, closed the kids’ wing to accommodate more adults after downtown hospitals lost power during the October storm and evacuated patients.
But the unit never reopened, and sick kids needing long-term care are now being shuttled to Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital 50 blocks north or Mount Sinai Hospital on the Upper East Side, about 20 blocks away.
Nurses claim that St. Luke’s had been trying to close the 28-bed unit for years because it was unprofitable. Its occupancy level tended to fluctuate, and most of its patients came from the poor surrounding community.
“The powers that be seem to have taken profit over patients,” said Gwen Lancaster, a registered nurse and union rep at St. Luke’s. “When they make these business decisions, they need to remember they are dealing with human lives.”
At the height of the flu season, the ward — which treated youngsters with asthma, sickle cell anemia and other illnesses — now only accommodates adults.
Nurses say that most of their pediatric patients are on public-health insurance programs and that their parents even walk to and from the hospital because they can’t afford a bus or cab ride.
“They’re taking away from people who have the least amount of resources,” said Michele Harris, a registered nurse at St. Luke’s for 27 years. “The community should have been told what they were going to do.”
St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center informed elected officials in a letter last week that it plans to transfer the pediatric unit to Roosevelt Hospital, on West 59th Street, sometime this year.
“Presently, we operate two small, inpatient pediatric units at both St. Luke’s Hospital and Roosevelt Hospital,” hospital center president Frank Cracolici wrote. “This is not an optimal model of care … quality and excellence can only be sustained where there is significant patient volume.”
Hospital officials say both pediatric units are under capacity, with an average of two to three patients at Roosevelt’s pediatric wing, and about six at St. Luke’s.
“The catalyst for this consolidation is quality not cost,” a hospital spokesman said.
The hospital must get approval from the state Health Department before the move can take place.
Still, locals are fuming that resources are slowly being siphoned out of St. Luke’s and put into Roosevelt — including the St. Luke’s obstetrics department in 2007.
“We’re going to wage war,” said community board chair Georgiette Morgan-Thomas. “The system feels it can dish out anything to poorer communities and not provide services. It’s unacceptable.”
St. Luke’s lost its pediatric unit for the first time in 1990. It was moved back from Roosevelt a decade later, after hospital officials said a majority of patients were coming from upper Manhattan.