Stringer 2013

By WNYC Newsroom

NEW YORK, NY —Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the city will step in to ensure that ambulance service continues in the West Village after the closing of St. Vincent's Hospital.

He says the Fire Department will take over the ambulance tours that are currently provided by the Greenwich Village medical center.

"The most important thing is getting to you quickly -- getting to you before a doctor, if you have a stroke or something like that," the mayor says. "Longer-term care, an operation or something, if you are on the other side of town, it probably wouldn't make any difference."

At a rally to save parts of the Greenwich Village institution, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer told the crowd that the board, the governor, and the state health commissioner should have acted more quickly once they knew St. Vincent's was $700 million dollars in the red.

"If they had come clean and said, 'We have a problem,' we could have solved it," Stringer said. "This is the worst case of stumbling and bumbling in the history of our state."

Gov. David Paterson says he hopes to help salvage the hospital's remaining services and create an urgent care center, and he's directed health officials to solicit proposals to that end.

Mayor Bloomberg says the city prepared "weeks ago" for the possibility that Saint Vincent's would close, and says the outcome is unfortunate but not unexpected.

The mayor also says that Bellevue Hospital will absorb many of the St. Vincent's patients, at a cost of several million dollars to the city.

Grace Clagnaz, who works in the pharmacy department, says the mood among employees is bleak. "Everybody's with their heads down, depressed," she says. "They're walking around there like zombies. They don't know what to say or do."

The hospital's board voted yesterday to shut down most inpatient services as early as next week, citing the recession and a series of state budget cuts over the past two years.

From WNYC