Beth Israel Hpsital Complex

Beth Israel Hospital main old building as seen from Eastern side of Stuyvesant Park.

I was at a business meeting at  Beth Israel in the late 1980's during which these business people and their wives were gathered in an auditorium to hear a cardiologist and other experts talk about new developments in their fields.

It was moderated by some bigwig from the Hospital Board.

The first speaker on cancer was pretty much just on script and rather chilling...yet gave hope for the future.

However, the cardiologist, who was next, somehow got sidetracked in his discussion of Heart Health into a rant about how he was not making as much money as he thought he would when he was in Medical School!

This theme of not making the money they expected was also jumped on by the new next two speakers, who were really complaining their heads off about it..

At this point, the men and women in the audience were beginning to shift around a little uneasily..and , sensing that this was all taking a bad turn, the bigwig from the Board jumped in and grabbed the microphone and said, very soothingly,

"I want to reassure you all that Beth Israel is first and foremost concerned about the Health of the Community and delivering the best care possible, to which we are also leading the way in research.  I want to emphasize we value the care and health of patients above everything else!"

The docs got the message from this and backed off on the complaining and the rest of the evening went pretty smoothly, except some people really did not want to see an an exhibit of all sorts of X-rays of brain cancer etc. which some of the doctors led them off to show..these people immediately ran off to a restaurant some ways Uptown ( I wish I could remember which one).

Well, anyway, that is my story about Beth Israel...to my surprise, Wikipedia does not have that much to say about it...but here

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Beth Israel Medical Center
Geography
Location	1st Avenue at 16th Street, New York City, New York, United States
Organization
Hospital type	Teaching
Affiliated university	Albert Einstein College of Medicine
Services
Beds	1,368
History
Founded	1890
Links
Website	http://www.wehealny.org/
Lists	Hospitals in the United States

Coordinates: 40.7335°N 73.9826°W

Linsky Pavilion of the Petrie Division on First Avenue and 16th Street in Manhattan. This façade has appeared in many sitcoms, including Friends.

 

Beth Israel Medical Center is a 1,368-bed, full-service tertiary teaching hospital in New York City. Originally dedicated to serving immigrant Jews living in the tenement slums of the Lower East Side, it was founded at the turn of the 20th century. The main hospital location is the Petrie Division at First Avenue and 16th Street, and facing Stuyvesant Square. Other campuses included Beth Israel-Kings Highway Division in Brooklyn and Phillips Ambulatory Care Center at Union Square.
It acts as University Hospital and Manhattan Campus for the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. The hospital is also a teaching hospital of St. George's University and the Phillips Beth Israel School of Nursing.

Beth Israel Medical Center is a member of the Continuum Health Partners, a nonprofit hospital system that includes three other institutions: Roosevelt Hospital, St. Luke's Hospital and the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.

Contents

Name

Beth Israel is Hebrew for "House of Israel".

History

Beth Israel was incorporated in 1890 by a group of 40 Orthodox Jews on the Lower East Side each of whom paid 25 cents to set up a hospital serving New York's Jewish immigrants, particularly newcomers. At the time New York's hospitals would not treat patients who had been in the city less than a year. It initially opened a dispensary on the Lower East Side. In 1891 it opened a 20-bed hospital and in 1892 expanded again and moved into a 115-bed hospital in 1902.^[1]

In 1929 it moved into a 13-story, 500-bed building at its current location at the corner of Stuyvesant Square. It purchased its neighbor the Manhattan General Hospital in 1964 and renamed the complex Beth Israel Medical Center, located at First Avenue and 16th Street in Manhattan. ^[1]
By the 1980s it had long extended beyond its Jewish base. In 1988 it had the largest network of heroin-treatment clinics in the United States with 7,500 patients and 23 facilities.^[1]

It acquired Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side in the 1990s, renaming it Beth Israel Medical Center-Singer Division, and Kings Highway Hospital Center in 1995, renaming it Beth Israel Medical Center-Kings Highway Division.
In 2004, Beth Israel Medical Center closed the Singer Division and consolidated its Manhattan inpatient operations at the main hospital campus, called the Petrie Division, on First Avenue at 16th Street in Manhattan.

As of 2010 Beth Israel Medical Center has residency training programs in nearly every major field of medicine including: Emergency Medicine, Internal Medicine, Surgery, ENT, Oral Maxillo-Facial Surgery, Radiology, Family Medicine, Dermatology, Obstetrics and Gynecology, Neurology, Ophthalmology, Pathology, Psychiatry, Podiatry, and Urology. Continuum Health Partners which owns Beth Israel provides resident trainees with subsidized housing and a competitive salary. In 2011 Huguette Clark died at the hospital at age 104. She left one million dollars to the hospital upon her death.