SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

Source: Gregory Maizous

A Coney Island Hospital doctor was honored for her leadership in helping advance the cause of the public hospital system.

Olga Golubovskaya, an MD and an associate chair of Rehabilitation Medicine at Coney Island Hospital (2601 Ocean Parkway), was one of eight Brooklyn doctors and 28 city doctors overall to receive a Doctors’ Day award. Issued by the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the award recognizes doctors for their leadership and commitment to advancing the mission of the public hospital system and providing the highest quality healthcare to New Yorkers.

Dr. Golubovskaya, and the other doctors were given high praise by HHC President Alan D. Aviles.

“The physicians we honor on this Doctors’ Day are vital to the well-being of our city. They are helping to make HHC a national model of safe, efficient, and patient-centered health care delivery and care deeply about our mission to serve New Yorkers regardless of their ability to pay or immigration status,” Aviles said.

Congratulations to Dr. Golubovskaya and all the other winners for their excellent service and their recognition. Keep up the good work!

Photo: Maria Danalakis

New York City’s Health Commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, sternly defended the city’s decision not to evacuate hospitals and senior centers before the advent of Superstorm Sandy, according to a report in The New York Times.

The health commissioner faced a litany of fiery questions from the City Council and argued that the decision not to evacuate the 6,300 patients to safer ground was based on information from the National Weather Service. In the time that an evacuation was capable of being executed, the NWS had reported that Sandy was headed for Long Island Sound. According to Farley, by the time it was clear that the storm would strike the heart of the city, it was too late to perform a mass evacuation.

“We couldn’t have accomplished the evacuation of everybody in Zone A before zero hour,” Farley stated at a council meeting, according to the Times.

Despite Farley’s insistence that the combination of inaccurate information and bad timing were the main cause of blame for the mess left in Sandy’s wake, City Council members wouldn’t let him off the hook.

“It was chaotic,” said Councilman David Greenfield, commenting on his own experience of observing barefoot seniors hurried out of Coney Island nursing homes, according to the New York Daily News. “It looked like a Third World country.”

The emergency evacuations that ensued following the storm were also poorly organized, leaving many family members in the dark as to where their loved ones were sent.

In the face of rigorous criticism, Farley insisted that, “due to the heroic efforts of many people, no one lost their lives in health care facilities because of the storm,” a fact that was not swallowed whole by Council members, according to the Times:

Some council members disputed that assessment, saying they believed that some deaths of old people that had been attributed to natural causes should actually have been ascribed to the storm. Dr. Farley said he was willing to look into any such deaths, but that the ultimate decision was up to the medical examiner, who had not confirmed those suspicions.

Correction (1/29/2013 at 10:41 a.m.): The original version of this article indicated the Councilman Greenfield witnessed barefoot seniors exiting Coney Island Hospital. That was an error. He witnessed them leaving Coney Island nursing homes, and the article has been amended to reflect this. We regret any confusion this may have caused.

Medical equipment! (Source: Stanford Medical History Center/Flick)

The following is a press release from the offices of State Senator David Storobin:

State Senator David Storobin (R-Brooklyn) announced that his district office in cooperation with FEMA, Project Chernobl and Dr. Igor Branovan will be helping doctors and other medical professionals get free medical equipment and furniture that has been generously donated.

The deadline to register is Tuesday, December 18, 2012.

Anyone interested may call Victoria Spodek at (718) 743-8610 or stop by our office during business hours at 2201 Avenue U.

We got the following e-mail about a Voorhies Avenue-based physician working with FEMA to obtain expensive replacement equipment for local doctors hit by Sandy:

Hurricane Sandy’s devastation has required our community to begin a long and difficult recovery. One of the hardest hit sectors was the medical community where many physicians have lost vital equipment. Many of these offices will not be able to continue serving the community without a “loan-free” solution. FEMA is attempting, through a collaborative effort with Dr. Daniel Branovan, to find much needed replacement equipment for local medical offices. He is currently compiling a database of equipment that local physicians desperately need. We hope to make this database as complete as possible by reaching out on a wide reaching forum such as yours. If possible, please make any kind of announcement for local physicians, who experienced losses, to email their contact information to mail@doctorbranovan.com as soon as they can so they can be informed of how to apply for replacement equipment.

Dr. Branovan is also working with Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz in trying to get FEMA to raise the $25,000 cap on the one percent interest business loans, saying that the amount wouldn’t even cover the cost of one piece of machinery in some medical offices.

Photo: Maria Danalakis

Superstorm Sandy crippled much of the New York’s infrastructure, stretching the deployment of emergency personnel and resources thin as whole sections of the city were left in the dark and rendered inoperable. New York’s hospitals are still dealing with the holes caused by Sandy’s disruption, especially by closing Coney Island Hospital, according to a report in the New York Times.

Since the storm blew over late last October, New York’s hospitals have seen a spike of emergency room patients, many being admitted in non-local centers whose staffs are pushed to the limit to deal with the influx. Doctors and nurses are working extra shifts and overtime, offices and lobbies have been converted into temporary care rooms, and extra beds are at a premium, forcing some hospitals to make emergency visits to local furniture stores to meet the demand.

Brooklyn patients, many ousted by the closure of Coney Island Hospital, have found themselves crammed into Maimonides Medical Center. Patients in Maimonides’s E.R. who normally wait four to five hours for a bed, are finding themselves waiting two to three days. According to the Times, “Almost every one of the additional 1,100 emergency patients this November compared with last November came from four ZIP codes affected by the storm and served by Coney Island Hospital, a public hospital that was closed because of storm damage.”

The Times goes on to describe the problems caused by the influx of psychiatric patients to Maimonides stemming from the closures of Coney Island Hospital and many of the adult homes shuttered by Sandy. Extra captain’s beds, which don’t have railings, had to be brought in from local furniture stores to prevent suicide attempts.

The closings of hospitals and stretching of resources and staff have severely affected the work of the doctors and surgeons as well. The Times writes that:

Obstetricians and surgeons from the closed hospitals have been particularly disadvantaged, since they are dependent on hospitals to treat their patients. Many displaced surgeons have been reduced to treating only the most desperately ill, and operating on nights and weekends, when hospitals tend to be least well staffed. “I think there’s no question that a lot of people have postponed anything that they can postpone that is elective,” said Dr. Andrew W. Brotman, senior vice president at NYU.

Photo: Maria Danalakis

Two weeks after Hurricane Sandy forced the evacuation of Coney Island Hospital, the institution reopened yesterday with limited operations, with full services expected to come back online in the first days of 2013.

The hospital, at 2601 Ocean Parkway, is offering limited outpatient services, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Patients should enter through the Tower building on Avenue Z, and can call (718) 616-6360 for more information.

Coney Island Hospital was evacuated the afternoon after Hurricane Sandy made landfall, knocking power out to the building and flooding the complex’s basements, where generators were stored.

Rebooting the emergency room is the Heath and Hospital Corporation’s next priority, which will take several more weeks.

“Full service for [Coney Island and Bellevue] hospitals, including their critical care units, their operating rooms, their in-patient units for Coney Island, we believe we can do that by the first week of January,” said Alan Aviles of the New York City Health and Hospital Corporation (HHC), according to NY1.

Located within the Zone A evacuation area, Coney Island Hospital suffered extreme flooding throughout the complex. Not only will boilers, electrical systems and air conditioning need replacement, but the hospitals also stored backup generators, IT servers and assistance, and emergency room support technologies in basements that became submerged with water.

HHC said they will make changes to the hospital’s setup to better prepare for storms and flooding in the future, including moving backup generators and IT support to higher floors.

FEMA will cover some of the damages, as well as reimburse the city for some of the work done.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has requested $300 million for emergency room repairs resulting from Sandy.

Administrators at the New York Artificial Kidney Center at 2651 East 14th Street have reached out to Sheepshead Bites, saying that they’ve been without power since the hurricane and that their patients lives are at risk. Meanwhile, they say, the city has been ignoring their concerns.

Employee Lona Leybengrub writes:

Our Dialysis Center treats 190 patients that rely on us for life sustaining treatments. We were flooded as a result of most recent storm and a huge tree, belonging to the city of New York (from the city property) fell on part of the center.  It has to be removed, however cannot be touched by us, only the city.  We have started to rebuild and clean up the place, however would not be able to open our doors to treat the Patients until that tree is removed.  We contacted the city agencies w/no response.  Patients are really suffering!  We are temporarily dialyzing them in another location, however cannot accommodate all of them since the borrowed space right now is much smaller and the conditions there do not allow us to provide them w/all necessities of complete treatments.  Some of our Patients end up going to local hospitals, however get inadequate treatments or none at all.  Without these treatments, they cannot survive!  Could you please help us out in any way you can? 

Administrator Clara Tarantul adds:

I have called 311, 911, 511, con Ed, parks dept, and DOH for help and have only gotten the run around. Fire dept said its not on fire and not there problem park dept would take a complain they said the tree did not fall where it’s a danger to people. And every other agency has ignored our cries for help.

SHEEPSHEAD BITES EXCLUSIVE: The city suddenly shut down a medical center in Brighton Beach in June, leaving several doctors with no place to work and no access to their medical records for as long as two weeks.

At least one local activist believes that barring doctors from their records creates a dangerous situation, and feels that the city should implement a procedure to ensure that commercial tenants of a building have the ability to reach vital information in situations such as this.

The medical center, located at 2965 Ocean Parkway, was closed June 13 by the New York City Department of Buildings for lacking a secondary means of egress, a technical term for an entrance and exit. The four-story building had only one open staircase, but, Department of Buildings regulations require an additional staircase for a building of such size in case of an emergency.

The building was locked immediately, without notifying the doctors who worked there.

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Sachakov

A Brighton Beach proctologist was convicted last week in Brooklyn Federal court for $3.5 million of fraudulent practices involving Medicare and several private healthcare organizations.

Boris Sachakov of Colon and Rectal Care of New York in Brighton Beach, was arrested in October 2010 for fraudulent medical claims in which he said he performed more procedures than any other proctologist in the nation. However, investigators concluded he was merely billing insurance companies for no treatment at all – and, in some cases, totally implausible claims such as charging more than $60,000 for 85 hemorrhoidectomies on a single patient in 20 months.

According to the New York Post, Sachakov allegedly yelled and threatened to punch his prosecutors for pointing at him during his trial. A short hearing pertaining to this incident was held after the trail.

Sachacov faces up to 10 years in jail and a fine of $250,000. He has now been placed in custody, where he will stay until his official sentencing.

Sachakov

Witnesses testified on Thursday against a proctologist accused of bilking Medicare and private healthcare programs out of $22.5 million through his Colon and Rectal Care of New York in Brighton Beach.

Federal agents arrested Dr. Boris Sachakov in October 2010, initially charging him with Medicare fraud to the tune of $3.5 million over two years. The investigation turned up additional charges, however, after authorities discovered more improper billing through private insurers.

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