SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

Roz Cohen with a portrait of her late husband, Norman.

Coney Island Hospital (2601 Ocean Parkway) and the Brooklyn Streetcar Artists’ Group dedicated a new exhibit space in the hospital to the memory of Norman Cohen, the late husband of Councilman Domenic Recchia staffer Roz Cohen.

Cohen, 83, passed away on January 29, 2013, at 11:45 p.m. with his family at his side, shortly after being diagnosed in October with acute leukemia. During that time, the hospital was still grappling with rebuilding after Superstorm Sandy and was in close communication with the councilman’s office. Upon learning of Roz’s loss, the hospital and the Brooklyn Streetcar Artists’ Group decided to dedicated the planned space in his memory.

Now the ninth floor waiting area of the hospital’s oncology department is a rotating art space, which will feature new pieces from the artists’ group once or twice a year and be the permanent home of a plaque and photo dedicated to Norman Cohen.

“He was a really good father, a good grandfather, a good husband,” Roz Cohen recalled. “He was very understanding.”

She remembers Norman, who retired after working in the stock market, helping her kids and grandchildren with their homework, as well as his sense of humor.

“He had a very good sense of humor. Very dry,” she said.

Norman and Roz celebrated 56 years of marriage before his passing. He is survived by Roz, his children Sharon and Howard, and five grandchildren, Matthew, Melissa, Jared, Chelsea and Ethan.

Roz has served  in Councilman Recchia’s district office for the last 12 years, as the senior constituent liaison. Friends and local leaders remember Norman as a quiet fixture at her side during community events and gatherings.

“We just want Coney Island Hospital to know how much we appreciate this in the community, but Norman most of all, for all the work that he has done,” said Recchia at the dedication of the exhibit space last week. “Behind the scenes, Norman was the man who made Roz what she is today. And she’s still going strong. Nothing’s holding her down.”

The Brooklyn Streetcar Artists’ Group also maintains a gallery on the second floor of Coney Island Hospital’s main building and can be seen during normal visiting hours.

Coney Island Hospital nurses go Gangnam Style during Nurse Appreciation Week.

Coney Island Hospital nurses, now fully reunited after months of work to bring Coney Island Hospital back online, celebrated National Nurses Week with five days full of events to celebrate their contributions to the hospital community.

National Nurses Week kicks off on May 6, National Nurses Day, and lasts through May 12, the birthday of Florence Nightingale, the founder of modern nursing. It’s a week to celebrate nurses and their caregiving. But while many New York City hospitals celebrate with just a luncheon, Coney Island Hospital has been going all-out for its nurses for years – and this year’s festivities carried special meaning in a hospital devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

“[Nurses Week at Coney Island Hospital] is a time to make sure that everybody finally gets to have some fun,” said Terry Mancher, the hospital’s nursing chief. “They love it. It’s good for nurse retention and morale.”

Mancher said that while most other hospitals celebrate their nurses with a luncheon, Coney Island Hospital celebrates with a week of events. This year they had service awards, a dance crew, a Broadway Comes to CIH event, and a cultural night when the nurses share their cultural heritage with their co-workers. The week caps off with the most boisterous, electric event of them all: the Record Label Review, when scores of nurses perform songs, dances and show off costumes from major music artists.

Mancher herself even did a little impromptu Gangnam Style during the event, and joined in on Alicia Keyes’ “Girl of Fire” – although she was certain to tell the audience to delete any photos of video they took of her performance.

Coney Island Hospital nurses played a key role in helping evacuate dozens of patients into upper-floors of the hospital as Sandy’s waters crashed into the building’s lobby, flooding the first floor and basement. The facility lost power from Con Edison, and as the water rose, they also had to shut down their generators to avoid damaging. The nurses stayed with their patients, providing comfort and solace until the hospital could be fully evacuated on October 30.

While the hospital remained offline for months, nurses were redeployed at facilities around the city. In the last few months, they’ve finally been reunited, as most of the hospital’s services have been restored.

And the return to familiarity has had a marked effect on the nurses, Mancher said, leading to one of the most meaningful Nurses Week since the extravagant celebrations began approximately 15 years ago.

“Everyone’s smiling all week and it makes it better than ever,” Mancher said. “Everyone felt more united, everyone came back, and we’re finally one big happy family again.”

The following is from our friends at the Brooklyn Streetcar Artists’ Group (BSAG):

Click to enlarge

Source: nytimes.com

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office announced that it is doubling the number of evacuation zones along New York City’s coastline. The New York Times is reporting that the expanded map will add 640,000 residents to the three million New Yorkers already living in such zones, putting 37.5 percent of the total population in evacuation zones.

The city is hoping that by expanding the evacuation zones, people will take calls to evacuate more seriously. The new map represents only a preliminary look of what is expected to change. A more detailed map is expected to be released in June.

While the evacuation zones have been expanded, it’s worth noting that to date, residents located in Zone A, which includes Sheepshead Bay, have been the only ones ever asked to evacuate.

The release of the new map was the major highlight of a city report on the response to Superstorm Sandy. The New York Times summarized a list of other conclusions and initiatives drawn from the report.

Many lessons learned from Hurricane Sandy will be set down in new “playbooks” for city agencies that had to learn on the fly how to deal with a major storm’s aftermath: how to request waivers and extensions from federal school-lunch and food-stamp programs to serve a deluge of needy families; how to muster economic development programs to help battered businesses get back up to speed faster.

Others issues will be left to future task forces to interpret.

A number of smaller recommendations are already being acted on, like the purchase of more emergency lights, generators and small boats for firefighters.

The report also calls for new regulations for hospitals, nursing homes and adult homes during evacuations. It recommends the creation of a patient tracking system, better communication equipment and guidelines for the return of patients.

Photo By Maria Danalakis

It has been six months since Superstorm Sandy caused millions of dollars of damage to Coney Island Hospital and even though the facility has reopened, it might take another year for the hospital to be fully restored, according to a report by New York 1.

Right now, the hospital is offering about two-thirds of the services it offered before Sandy shut it down and there are significant shortages yet to be overcome.

“The emergency department is operating in about 40 percent of the space prior to what it did to the storm, 911 receiving we were bringing in medicine patients and pediatric patients,” said Coney Island Hospital Executive Director Arthur Wagner.

The in-patient pediatric wing is still down and the MRI/CAT scan room is under construction. Workers are trying to strike a careful balance between providing needed services, rebuilding and keeping areas near active construction zones clean.

Despite the setbacks, Wagner credits his staff of 2,800 for giving all they could following the storm.

“They had houses and family that were affected and they still provided those services,” Wagner told New York 1.

To protect the hospital from suffering another huge power outage in the face of potential future flooding, a new electrical room is being built in a room on higher ground. Until that project is completed, the hospital is currently receiving power from neighboring buildings.

The hospital is also considering future projects that might include constructing an elevated emergency building and a water barrier surrounding the hospital’s campus. These projects would require large governmental funding.

Source: Gregory Maizous

Peter Wolf, the former director of the Coney Island Hospital, was fined for accepting gifts from a doctors’ group, according to a report by the New York Post.

Wolf had to pay $6,000 for violating city ethics rules by accepting gifts from the University Medical Associates back in 2005. Wolf had abruptly resigned his post in January of 2009 and admitted his ethical violations in a settlement with the Conflicts of Interests Board.

According to the Post, Wolf had received two bottles of wine, a $500 gift card and two surprise parties, one for his birthday and one for celebrating a promotion. When Wolf served as the director of Coney Island Hospital, his yearly salary was $231,000.

Uncle Sam Is Picking Up NYC’s Sandy Tab. (Source: James Montgomery Flagg via Wikimedia Commons)

When Superstorm Sandy wrecked New York City late last October, we knew it would cost billions of dollars to clean up the mess left by Mother Nature. Thankfully, we can count on Uncle Sam, another mythical avatar, to pay for the mess left in Sandy’s wake. According to a report by Crain’s, the federal government, via FEMA and community development block grant funds, is paying 100 percent of the city’s enormous Sandy repair bill.

New York City alone suffered a staggering $6.3 billion in damages and emergency expenditures in the wake of Sandy’s wrath. FEMA is paying for 90 percent of the total bill, with the remaining 10 percent coming from the aforementioned community development block grant funds.

The money breaks down as follows.

• $341 million to cover staffing costs,
• $188 million in overtime pay for city workers
• $1.4 billion in immediate repair and relief bills
• $3.1 billion for road reconstruction, parks, beaches and pier repair
• $1.8 billion to fund public housing and business recovery
• $500 million to fund the city’s Rapid Repairs program
• $100 million for Bellevue and Coney Island Hospitals
• $61 million for debris removal
• $57 million for school repairs
• $34 million for demolitions of uninhabitable homes
• $824 million for road reconstruction
• $436 million for beachfront repairs in the Rockaways, Brighton Beach and Coney Island
• $528 million for future expenditures on beach, boardwalk, park and playground construction

It’ll be nice to see how far all this money goes to cleaning up and repairing the city, that is until another storm comes and washes away all the work this cash is earmarked for.

Photo by Maria Danalakis

PBS just published an article that delves into the complicated and confusing world of hospital grading, a system that is baffling people as to how effective and reliable their hospital choices are.

Hospitals are graded by a wide range of rating organizations, all using different metrics to sort through what they consider quality care:

The calculations that go into these ratings are complex. Most hospital assessments synthesize dozens of pieces of data Medicare publishes on its Hospital Compare website, including death rates and the results of patient satisfaction surveys. They also examine other sources and use private surveys to create user-friendly lists or grades, which they display on their websites.

The Joint Commission looks at how frequently patients received recommended treatments, such as flu shots for those with pneumonia. Consumer Reports examines the numbers of patients who die or are readmitted, infection rates and Medicare patient surveys of their experiences. Leapfrog looks at data from its surveys of hospitals, the consistency with which hospitals followed safe surgical practices and frequencies of infections and some types of patient harm. Healthgrades analyzes detailed Medicare records to find death and complication rates for 27 procedures and conditions.

I decided to take a quick look at Coney Island Hospital’s scores and found that not only was I getting different answers, but different kinds of answers depending on which grading service I used.

Leapfrog gives Coney Island Hospital a C letter grade score. When you click the link that explains how they arrived at that score, they don’t address the specific hospital in question. Instead, they give you a complicated breakdown of their scoring system in general.

Healthgrades doesn’t give a final easy to read to ranking like Leapfrog, but rather parses its rating over several various procedures. For example, according to Healthgrades, Coney Island Hospital’s treatment of collapsed lungs is ranked above average while their treatment of blood clots following surgeries are ranked below average. It lends to itself to a level of specificity that promotes more vagueness than clarity.

Overall, the article presents a fascinating look at how too much information might be limiting people in their effort to gain a clear picture of the best health care options available to them, and is well worth checking out.

Source: Gregory Maizous

The following is a press release from the Health and Hospitals Corporation:

The New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation announced today that for the first time since Hurricane Sandy flooded its basement and first floor, causing substantial damage to its emergency department, Coney Island Hospital is again receiving ambulances for most types of cases through the City’s 911 service.

“The restoration of ambulance service brings us one step closer to our goal of restoring all services in the facility and re-establishing ourselves as the primary health care source in southern Brooklyn,” said Arthur Wagner, the hospital’s Executive Director.

“Since the storm, Coney Island has been systematically restoring services to help meet the healthcare needs of the community,” said Dr. John Maese, Chief Medical Officer. “We are delighted to again expand our much-needed services to the community and accept 911 ambulances.”

Ambulances began arriving at Coney Island on Wednesday, February 20. The hospital is accepting most types of 911 patients, including heart attacks and stroke cases. Trauma care and labor and delivery remain closed.

Repairs are ongoing at Coney Island, and its emergency department continues to function at a reduced capacity due to storm damage. However, the hospital’s Tower Building has re-opened along with most of its inpatient beds and imaging and laboratory services, and the hospital has for several weeks been admitting walk-in patients from its emergency department and patients from other HHC facilities.

It has inpatient adult psychiatric beds available, operating rooms, as well as medical/surgical and intensive care beds. All primary and specialty outpatient clinics are open, and have been operating a fleet of mobile medical vans providing primary care services and flu shots in parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island affected by Sandy.

Photo Provided By Bay Improvement Group

Coney Island Hospital’s Mobile Medical Unit is back on Emmons Avenue, this time near Nostrand Avenue in front of the Best Western Hotel, providing free flu shots, tetanus shots, respiratory checks and more.

The van will be there until 5 p.m. today, and returns tomorrow, Saturday, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.