Medical/Dental Board of
Harlem Hospital Center
Dear Colleagues:
Harlem stood behind you when you needed its support for the Manhattanville expansion. Why do you abandon it now, sitting idly by as medical care at Harlem Hospital is outsourced?
For nearly sixty years, Columbia has supported Harlem Hospital in providing quality care to its neediest. Why do you abandon it now, as neurosurgery and rehabilitation medicine services are being shut down?
Harlem Hospital’s Level I Trauma Center leads the state and the nation in injury care and prevention. Why do you abandon it now, by allowing loss of these vital services to threaten its trauma designation?
Harlem Hospital is the only reliable source of specialized tertiary care for the citizens of our community. Why do you abandon it now, as medical and surgical specialty services wither for lack of sufficient staff?
Columbia’s support of Harlem Hospital has brought our community many of America’s finest physicians. Why do you abandon it now, letting the City bring in less accomplished doctors just to save a few dollars?
Harlem Hospital has championed Columbia’s mission to “discover, educate, care, lead” for generations. Why do you abandon it now, as training programs attracting minority doctors and scientists are gutted?
The Medical/Dental Board of Harlem Hospital sees clearly the fiscal challenges facing the City and the University in the current economy. Yet we also recognize the City Comptroller’s recent report citing alleged “failures” of monitoring and management on the part of both the Health and Hospitals Corporation and Columbia University, for what so plainly it is–a thinly veiled, shamelessly cynical, politically motivated excuse
to divert a multimillion dollar contract to a favored “vendor” with little experience and a limited record.
The Medical/Dental Board of Harlem Hospital has also not forgotten what ensued at a sister institution a dozen years ago, when the Health and Hospitals Corporation likewise outsourced medical care to nonacademic doctors. What followed was real scandal after real scandal, where real patients died, leading to months of monitoring by State and Federal agencies–unlike the carefully orchestrated, trumped up “scandal” regarding echocardiograms at Harlem Hospital that hurt no one, the full story of which is not being told, because it was easier to blame Columbia doctors than callous administrators.
In truth, Columbia doctors at Harlem Hospital are not only great physicians, they are great people. They do not deserve to be tarred with the brush of alleged incompetence, or worse, when their only “failing” has been to try to do more with less, as staff are cut, their leadership is decimated by firings without cause or due process, and their pleas on behalf of their patients are ignored by heartless executives who have
A MEMBER OF NEW YORK CITY HEALTH AND HOSPITALS CORPORATION
tragically forgotten that care for our neediest is a right guaranteed by the New York City Charter.
No doubt, Columbia is rightly disgusted by the ongoing efforts to paint it as villain, and rightly dubious of a one sided contractual relationship which encourages the City to treat our University as a cash cow that it simultaneously starves and milks. For it is well known the University has lost tens of millions of dollars over the decades in care it provided that was not properly reimbursed by the City, always with the same lame excuse–there were a few undotted “i”s and uncrossed “t”s in the documentation submitted.
We are Harlem’s doctors. We have no time for politics. Patient care is our calling. We are loyal not only to the people we are privileged to serve, we are loyal to our University, because we know far better than anyone what will happen to patient care in our community when we are no longer able to find talented young doctors to join Columbia’s ranks via Harlem Hospital. It will rapidly deteriorate, and take Harlem back to the horrific days that forced the Health and Hospitals Corporation to turn to us in the first place.
We implore you to stand and fight with us. A weakened “academic affiliation” simply cannot stand up against the power of a multibillion dollar Corporation, but our great University can. Columbia’s support of Harlem Hospital has never been more vital than it is today. We can unite to leverage the strengths of the University’s medical, nursing, public health, law, and business faculties to develop viable models for accountable care organizations that will serve the public health and the public good for years to come.
Columbia lives and works in the Harlem community we all call home. Harlem has never abandoned our great University, and will never do so, because its citizens realize the tremendous strength and vitality it brings our community. Yet the reverse is no less true. Harlem brings Columbia a richness of society and diversity that exists virtually nowhere else in the City, if not the world, serving as a constant reminder of why it exists at all–to find solutions to the problems that beset humankind, both globally, and locally.
We therefore call upon you to do what is right–help us care for our community, and our University. Columbia faculty at Harlem Hospital, together with colleagues from Washington and Morningside Heights, can and will find ways to provide health care more effectively and efficiently to our community. Do not let the Health and Hospitals Corporation rob Harlem of its most precious healthcare resource– quality care by physicians and surgeons of the Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons.
Respectfully yours,
Medical/Dental Board of
Harlem Hospital Center