Keeping the water at bay: New Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital a boon to South Brooklyn
The new Health + Hospitals-run Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hospital in South Brooklyn will open its doors to patients today. They shouldn’t find the structure’s gleaming, glass-encased exterior deceiving: the 11-story building is practically a fortress, designed to fend off not invading barbarians but the encroaching elements and the threat of extreme weather in particular.
We applaud FEMA for picking up the almost $1 billion tab for the new facility, as well it should: the former Coney Island Hospital was devastated by just the type of disaster that fits in FEMA’s mandate: 2012′s Superstorm Sandy. While people love to balk at big public spending price tags, they should keep in mind that there’s a cost to not spending the money up front and having to make up for it later, not only in terms of the financial outlays on repairs and mitigation but the health and even lives of patients who could get caught up in another flooding catastrophe.
In any case, it’s never bad to have new, state-of-the-art public medical facilities in the city, particularly those in parts of the city that don’t have the concentrations of private treatment beds that other neighborhoods enjoy. The new building, just one of several that make up the renamed South Brooklyn Health, features 80 single rooms.
Ultimately, Sandy isn’t the only disaster that this hospital and the Health + Hospitals system more generally have dealt with in recent years. Among other hard lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic was the need to preserve beds and reverse losses in general treatment capacity, and hopefully the Ginsburg Hospital will set a standard for investment in our hospital networks.
The only way to do that effectively is to ensure that the costs of operating this network don’t spiral out of control, and on that front, Health + Hospitals, under the capable direction of Dr. Mitch Katz, has made admirable strides that, crucially, don’t involve cutting service or turning away the vulnerable populations that public hospital systems are designed to serve. The future’s looking bright.
