Mount Sinai intends to bring a Behavioral Health Center to replace Rivington House. It will directly impact here.
The full size flyers are below for the November 4th Forum on the Behavioral Health proposal and the entire plan to downsize Beth Israel.
There will be advocates and elected representatives and a few experts and Mount Sinai there to listen.
Please come November 4th – both of these institutions will affect our lives here – bring your questions, hopes, demands..etc…
Sample Questions:
- – How will these institutions impact their new locations?
- – Will services will be accessible for our low -income community members?
- – What advocacy will we see for those who (with Mount Sinai’s lease) have lost their chance to remain in their neighborhood of Rivington House, our most fragile elders (including some formerly housed people living with HIV/AIDS) in need of skilled care – who, but for our appalling failure to provide adequate oversight rightfully should be living in Rivington House now?
- – What benefits will be seen for the 40-60 homeless, mostly Black men right outside Mount Sinai’s doors – a number who suffer from the stresses of lifetimes of racism, poverty, poor health care, abuse, targeted for destruction and/or who are “mentally ill”?
- – If an ER room is downsized without capacity what happens?
- – If Rivington House is allowed to again be repurposed with no iron-clad assistance to build model housing with skilled nursing care regulated ratios – what happens to those without the means to ‘age in place’ in their community who were denied a home due to mismanagement/profiteering?
- – Who will the proposed Behavioral Health Center serve?
- – What catchment area (who?) were the provisions in the Behavioral Health CON based on?
- – Will the deaths by suicide of three young women doctors and lingering questions from a sexual assault of a patient (in part of Mount Sinai’s vast network) result in a radical independent review with recommendations – which are then put in place? (with a full understanding this is not an isolated problem in any institution).
- New Yorker article
“In a statement, the hospital says, “We are so sorry that Ms. Newman was the victim of this horrible criminal act.” But for more than three years, it has been fighting her in court, where she has brought a damages suit.”
…Mount Sinai is a massive world-class teaching hospital with a selective medical school ..with women in several prominent leadership positions and a collection of programs focused on underserved communities. Caring clinicians are literally everywhere. …But the hierarchical, macho, fear-based, profit-oriented culture of hospital medicine is especially intense and pervasive there, according to dozens of interviews, most off-the-record owing to anxiety about career-damaging retribution. People who know [the director] well note that, for a psychiatrist, he is short on empathy and patience, and though the hospital denies it, among the faculty and staff, he has a reputation as a bully. So in 2009, for example, when Andrew Goldstein.. organized a panel on pharmaceutical companies’ extending their patents in order to increase profitability (a position Mount Sinai’s CEO, Kenneth Davis, endorsed in an advertorial in the New York Times) and had the temerity to question a last-minute addition to the panel by Charney, he received a call while studying at home from the dean himself. Charney came out blasting…”
“…according to several people with knowledge of the finances, the hospital system began bleeding cash. Charney and Davis — also a psychiatrist and Charney’s close friend — sharpened their focus on profitability, consolidating and cutting wherever they could, including in the ED. In September 2017, when Erik Barton, an emergency physician and M.B.A. who had been hired to rationalize processes among the seven emergency rooms in the Mount Sinai system, presented Charney with his budget, which included an increase in head count — “to bring things up to safe standards,” Barton tells me — “he slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘How do you expect me to go to the board with that?’?” Barton remembers. “I was in shock to be treated like that in front of a whole group of people.” Citing differences in management styles, Barton proffered his resignation within six months….”
“And, according to a complaint filed in federal court this spring that charged the hospital with widespread violations of Title IX, when Charney got involved in the hiring of the new head of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health, he sent an email to the female candidate favored by the search committee, calling her an IDIOT, in all capital letters, in red. The hospital says she was asking for ridiculous compensation, but the candidate withdrew her application, saying she had never been so bullied in her life. Charney tapped a 32-year-old resident named Prabhjot Singh instead. Singh was a “rising star” within Sinai with connections to the Arnhold family and a protégé of the public intellectual Jeffrey Sachs. When he got the job, Singh allegedly demoted and humiliated women on his staff and hired a deputy who allegedly called women “c***ts” and “b****s.”
“…Dr. Joomun was the third Mount Sinai hospital employee in two years to die by suicide while at Mount Sinai. First-year internal medicine resident Esha Baichoo died in March of 2016 and fourth-year medical student Kathryn Stascavage died in August of that same year.”
For a health system gearing up to bring a Behavioral Health facility into our neighborhood assurances are necessary – the people served will be far more vulnerable than the general public.
Hoping to see The NY State Department of Health [DOH] on November 4th.
If our NYState health oversight agency isn’t providing expertise on 2 CONs that entail a seismic shift in two major healthcare institutions – who else does the public turn to?
Mount Sinai presents authoritatively and with vested interests – how will they be held accountable for adequate care, representations in the CONs, and their promises/gestures of ‘community engagement’ and ‘partnerships’?
and…Dr. Howard Zucker you kind of owe this neighborhood?
Rivington House was lost through a series of missteps, outright deception, the profits-over-vulnerable-people cultures of Allure/Slate/China Vanke/Adam America
it was also lost through a lack of proper oversight by NY State Department of Health (among other City and State agencies).
WNYC’s Cynthia Rodriquez 3-month investigation:
“Nursing home operators are supposed to give the state Department of Health 90 days notice and submit a detailed plan on how patients will be transferred. The plan includes a roster of patients, a process for relocating them and notification to families of possible alternatives. The agency has to approve the plan before anyone gets moved out. …
None of that happened at Rivington House. People in fragile condition were removed despite the risks to their health. No comprehensive plans were in place.
“After the state Health Department [DOH] found it empty, the Allure Group was allowed to submit a closure plan anyway. Health officials then approved it without fines or penalties.
“Danford works for a non-profit and any time a nursing home closes, he gets notified and acts as an advocate for patients and their families. But this time, all the patients were gone before there was a chance to meet with them. Danford said that when proper procedures are not followed, there is no way of knowing who was living there or where they went.
“You have aged people, people with serious disabilities. The process for relocating for that population is very complicated and they do have rights,” Danford said.
“I have never heard of being able to file a closure plan retroactively,” said Susan Dooha, director of the Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York …She’s been advocating for seniors for 14 years.
Danford was also surprised by the state’s actions: “It was highly unusual. Let me put it that way. I’d never run into anything like that..”
The PHHPC is already rumored to be ‘captured’ by interests other than the consumer. This doesn’t help.