Former SDR Community Coalition Partner Rivington House Goes Out.

Not With A Bang, But With A Bureaucratic Whimper

“The Public Health and Health Planning Council (subcommittee) PHHPC yesterday approved the Certificate of Need (CON) application for a Behavioral Health Facility run by Mount Sinai /Beth Israel. It will go to the full PHHPC committee for almost certain passage. The PHHPC has two consumer advocate positions. One was only recently filled. Many are industry insiders. Some, we felt, understood the difficulties low-income communities are placed in when there are no knowledgeable experts to consult with.

Neighbors to Save Rivington House wrote this response and spoke at the hearing yesterday. This was cobbled together to express some of what this struggle has meant. We did it without an without an independent expert on the behavioral health CON process. The Department of Health never showed up to provide guidance at either local Forums organized by local elected representatives and advocates opposed to the downsizing of Mount Sinai /Beth Israel and Neighbors to Save Rivington House.

Rivington House staff and residents were our partners, colleagues, friends.

We lost a state of the art infectious disease skilled nursing care center that NYS taxpayers funded. All the equipment was destroyed by Slate Property to make way for luxury housing (that thanks to us, never got built). We are experiencing infectious epidemics with little in the way of sites with knowledgeable staffing – the coronavirus just the latest but certainly not the last.

The question of the Allure Group and the Attorney General’s Settlement, given their history here and elsewhere, their competence and trustworthiness to provide decent nursing home care are still to be worked out.”

SDR Community Coalition:

Mount Sinai will be Sara Roosevelt Park Community neighbors. They have offered to come to meeting to listen and answer questions. We will welcome them in and expect them to join the ethos of our community.