By Anna Gustafson
New Parkway Hospital in Forest Hills will soon be closing its doors after serving the community for more than four decades and battling for months to keep open the facility that community members say has saved a countless number of lives since opening in the mid-1960s.
The state Department of Health notified the hospital on Wednesday that the facility’s state operating license was no longer valid, hospital officials said Thursday.
“No one comes and padlocks the building, but we are not taking new admissions,” said hospital spokesman Fred Stewart. “We can still provide medical services out of this building. The only thing we can’t do is provide acute care inpatient services. Most of our patients will be transferred in the next several days.”
Parkway is one of the hospitals the New York State Commission on Healthcare Facilities in the 21st Century, known as the Berger Commission, mandated to close because the panel said the area had too many unused hospital beds. Additionally, Department of Health spokeswoman Claudia Hutton said Parkway “scored lowest of hospitals in that area on items such as financial stability, numbers of patients served, and how well their revenues covered their expenses.”
Since the Department of Health ordered the hospital closed on Sept. 30, Parkway has been battling the state in the courts and had received a temporary restraining order against the state agency in September, which allowed the hospital to remain open. However, Stewart said an appellate court did not grant the hospital a hearing to keep the temporary restraining order in place last week. Attempts to fight the appellate’s court decision failed when the hospital went Monday to federal court, which denied it a temporary restraining order.
“It’s an outrage that hospital is allowed to close,” said Estelle Chwat, the hospital’s first personnel director. “There are plenty of people, plenty of elderly people, who need that hospital.”
Though Hutton said area residents will not have to travel far to go to such facilities as Flushing or Forest Hills hospitals, Chwat said other hospitals are too distant for residents living on Grand Central Parkway, where Parkway is located, when emergencies strike. She also said other area institutions can be overcrowded, though Hutton said area residents should have no problem locating open beds.
“There have been many times that hospital has saved our lives,” Chwat said of Parkway. “It has saved many lives.”
There are currently about 300 employees at the hospital and fewer than 18 patients who need to be moved, Stewart said.
Stewart said he was “dismayed this was happening” to a hospital he contended is needed in an area which he said has hospitals in trouble. Caritas, which owns St. John’s Hospital in Elmhurst and Mary Immaculate in Jamaica, is strapped for cash. Jamaica Hospital is in turmoil after executives there were allegedly connected to embattled state Assemblyman Anthony Seminerio (D-Richmond Hill).
Seminerio was charged in August in a criminal complaint alleging he set up a fake consulting business that received $310,000 in payments believed to have come from Jamaica Hospital executives.
The Department of Health has recommended Parkway become a health clinic, and Stewart said the institution will remain in the health care business.
“We have plans for reconfiguration to be a diagnostic or treatment center,” Stewart said.
Parkway would need to submit plans to the Department of Health before it could become a clinic, Hutton said.
Howard Koplowitz contributed to this article.
