Beth Israel hospital in Manhattan won't close Friday — but aims to quickly

Mount Sinai’s Beth Israel hospital in Downtown Manhattan will keep serving patients beyond Friday despite hospital officials' monthslong push to shut down by that day, according to a memo sent to staff Wednesday.

Hospital officials held out until the last minute to say definitively whether the 130-year-old medical center would close its doors by the target date. Beth Israel still has not received the necessary approval to close from the state Department of Health. The hospital also remains subject to a temporary restraining order barring it from reducing its services, issued after community members sued to keep Beth Israel open.

“We will, of course, not commence the closure process without approval by the state and until the legal hurdles are cleared, but there is urgency as there are risks associated with keeping the hospital open beyond the proposed date,” Mount Sinai Health System CEO Dr. Brendan Carr and Beth Israel President Elisabeth Sellman wrote in the memo to employees.

Mount Sinai has maintained for months an imminent closure is necessary because Beth Israel is losing money. It experienced an exodus of staff after the closure was announced.

The health department said this week it is still reviewing the most recent version of the hospital’s closure plan after rejecting a version of the proposal in April. Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court judge who issued the temporary order is considering further action to compel the hospital to stay open, with the next court date set for Aug. 8.

It’s not clear from the memo what level of service will remain at the hospital while it stays open.

The union 1199SEIU said Beth Israel has guaranteed positions at other hospitals within the Mount Sinai system to unionized employees. Some staffers have already been transferred, while others are planning to stay at Beth Israel until the hospital closes.

Hospital leaders maintain that keeping Beth Israel open poses both a financial threat to the Mount Sinai Health System and an ongoing danger to patients’ safety. They said there aren’t enough staffers left to ensure they can treat patients properly.

In Wednesday’s memo, hospital leaders said they have worked to recruit staff and hire temporary employees to keep the hospital functioning, but “have not been able to bring in all the staff that we would like to.”

But community members who sued the hospital to keep it open alleged Mount Sinai officials intentionally manufactured a crisis by diminishing services and driving away staff.

Beth Israel officials first submitted a closure plan to the state health department in October, saying the hospital had to close its doors because it was losing money and the patient census was declining. In November, Beth Israel officials laid out a timeline to incrementally reduce services as they prepared to fully shut down by Friday, July 12. The officials at the time said they had to cut services to maintain patient safety as staff departed.

But when Beth Israel started winding down patient care, the state health department hit the hospital with a cease-and-desist order in December, directing the hospital to stop cutting services without permission.

The separate temporary restraining order issued in response to the community members’ lawsuit reinforced that directive and added that the hospital should make an effort to restore services that had been cut since December.

A Mount Sinai spokesperson said the hospital has complied with the court order.

Still, the hospital is providing far less patient care than it once was. Between January and October of last year, more than 4,000 patients visited Beth Israel’s emergency room each month, state data shows. That number plummeted in November of last year after the closure plan was announced. In the first five months of 2024, the emergency room has seen an average of just 200 patients a month.

Arthur Schwartz, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit against Beth Israel and a plaintiff in the case, took his 102-year-old mother there for care in May after she had a medical issue at her assisted living facility, according to an affidavit he submitted in the case. He said he wanted her to go to Beth Israel because he knew it would be less crowded than other Manhattan hospitals, but he said he had trouble convincing ambulance drivers that the facility was still accepting patients.

The hospital was “as quiet as a morgue” during the 12 days his mother stayed there, Schwartz wrote in his affidavit.

Aixa Torres, president of the Resident Association at the Alfred E. Smith Houses, a public housing complex in the Two Bridges neighborhood, said many of her neighbors are elderly and upset about the closure plans.

“It's unconscionable to me that a medical institution is closing because they want to make money,” said Torres, who is seeking to join the lawsuit.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Beth Israel, which include local tenants associations and the nonprofit Center for Independence of the Disabled, updated their complaint last month.

They are asking the judge to not only order Beth Israel to stay open, but also to restore services that were discontinued as long ago as 2017, including a cardiac surgery unit. They are also asking the judge to compel the state Department of Health, which is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, to reject Beth Israel’s closure plan.

Both Beth Israel and the health department have argued in court documents that the judge does not have the authority to dictate the health department’s decision on the closure plan. Such an order “upends the regulatory structure,” the health department argues in its filings.