Metro

Turning patients away

Financially troubled Long Island College Hospital in Brooklyn stopped accepting ambulance patients yesterday morning — the latest development in SUNY Downstate’s long-running battle to close the beleaguered facility.

The operator wants to shut the 506-bed Cobble Hill hospital — which it says loses $4 million a month — but a suit filed by doctors and nurses groups has held up the closure.

Even as a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge ordered SUNY Downstate to keep staffing at levels in place before the attempted closing, ambulance patients were being diverted to other Brooklyn hospitals, which were straining from the increase.

“We are astonished that in the face of a clear order to maintain operations at LICH, Downstate management has issued directives to divert ambulances and transfer patients,” said Concerned Physicians of LICH President Dr. Toomas Sorra.

“These directives unnecessarily compromise patient safety.”

FDNY spokesman Jim Long said that without LICH, emergency patients would be taken to other Brooklyn hospitals or even to Manhattan. He added that LICH wasn’t a trauma center, so seriously injured patients wouldn’t have been taken there anyway.