LICH SAVED — for now at least — as SUNY withdraws closure plan
Downstate will hunt for a new operator
Several months of protests, letter-writing campaigns, meetings with state officials and court action finally saw some results on Friday when SUNY Downstate Medical Center, the “parent company” of Cobble Hill’s Long Island College Hospital (LICH), said it would withdraw its plan, which it had earlier submitted to the state Department of Health, to close LICH.
Instead, said Ron Najman, spokesman for Downstate, in a statement, Downstate “would continue to seek a provider of healthcare services within the LICH community, including potentially a hospital operator.”
Just recently, Dr. Toomas Soora, president of Concerned Physicians of LICH, told the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that representatives of Hackensack University Medical Center and North Shore-Long Island Jewish Hospital had sat down with LICH doctors for discussions about purchasing the hospital. At the time, however, the overture was rebuffed by Downstate.
Downstate still made it clear, in its statement, that it still sees LICH’s long-running monetary problems as a threat to the parent hospital, which itself is in a precarious financial state.