Regional News/Northeast: Moving forward

NYU Langone Medical Center, the badly battered 806-bed facility that was shuttered by superstorm Sandy, resumed many of its operations Dec. 27, but its emergency room will remain closed and will continue routing patients to other facilities.

The hospital, which was forced to evacuate about 300 patients down several flights of stairs when its backup generator failed, has reopened several departments and plans to resume nearly all services by mid-January.

However, the medical center's emergency department will remain shuttered and will be replaced with an urgent-care center. It will be staffed with emergency medicine physicians who will handle minor complaints, admit patients with more serious conditions or send patients who need additional ER services to other facilities by ambulance. The emergency department was undergoing the initial phases of an expansion and renovation when the storm hit in October.

Services reopened at the center's flagship Tisch Hospital and Schwartz Health Care Center include inpatient and outpatient surgery, medical and surgical intensive care, electrophysiology, interventional radiology, neurosurgery, pediatric ambulatory surgery, noninvasive cardiology, cardiovascular surgery and cardiovascular catheterization procedures. Ancillary services including radiology, dialysis, pharmacy, pathology, microbiology and respiratory therapy and the center's blood bank are also available.

The Hospital for Joint Diseases, Center for Musculoskeletal Care, Clinical Cancer Center and physician offices on the main campus are also operating.

The hospital expects on Jan. 14 to reopen additional services, including epilepsy care, observation care, hematology/oncology, pediatrics and pediatric intensive care, internal medicine, and its mother/baby unit and neonatal intensive-care unit.

Bellevue Hospital Center, a 828-bed public hospital that also serves as a teaching site for New York University's School of Medicine, started receiving ambulances again on Dec. 24.

Like NYU Langone, the facility is along the East River and lost power after its basement flooded.

Yet Bellevue is accepting only patients with noncritical and nontraumatic injuries and is not operating as a Level I trauma center. Like NYU Langone, it plans to transfer patients via ambulance to other facilities when necessary.

Bellevue has been operating outpatient clinics since Nov. 19 and has continued to add specialty clinics and other services such as radiology, nuclear medicine and mammography.