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Emergency Room to open today
(by Megan Burrow - October 01, 2008)
As the emergency room at the former site of
Pascack
Valley
Hospital , now Hackensack University Medical Center North at
Pascack
Valley (HUMC North), gets set to re-open its doors Wednesday, Touro University College of Medicine and HUMC have abandoned the plan to share the 20-acre Westwood campus.
The medical school will instead use a six-story office building the institution owns in
Hasbrouck
Heights as the site for its main campus. TouroMed and HUMC bought the land at a bankruptcy auction last February for $45 million.
Since it bought the property in February, HUMC gained an investor,
Texas based Legacy Hospital Partners, a private equity firm that promised an $80 million investment in the property to help the hospital re-open.
Hackensack plans to buy out Touro’s $25 million share of the site, but it is unclear whether HUMC will buy Touro’s parcel of the property alone or with help from Legacy.
Joe Feldman, M.D., director of emergency services at HUMC, said the hospital will still have an important relationship with Touro because, “the school will be sending their students here.”
The split was described as a mutual one based on the needs of both parties. Westwood Mayor John Birkner commented that while he is disappointed because he “thought it would be a nice component to the community to have a medical school here,” it was “just a business decision based on the needs of each entity in regards to space.”
“The clinical relationship is going to remain,” he said. “Touro students will still be coming to the site, but the school operations will remain in
Hasbrouck
Heights .”
The four-story building that was to house the medical school was used for physical therapy, physician offices, a cardiac rehabilitation center, and a sleep center. Feldman said that because the situation is still developing at a rapid pace, the plans for the building which would have housed the medical school are not “all fleshed out at this time,” but they would likely include outpatient services, such as cardiac rehab and other rehabilitation services.
Bob Garrett, HUMC’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, commented that Touro opted to no longer share the facility because “their plans for the future are such that they felt it wouldn’t be enough room for expansion. That opens up approximately 100,000 square feet of space to develop outpatient programs that were provided at the former
Pascack
Valley
Hospital .”
“That is all positive stuff,” said Birkner. “That is all stuff that we really miss and that the senior population especially will be able to make use of.”
Initially, the new emergency room will have 14 beds, four additional beds for observation and another five in the “fast track area.”
“We are really excited to open on Oct. 1 and serve the needs of Westwood residents and the surrounding communities,” Feldman said. “All of the staff has been hired, the building is totally renovated and all of the equipment is in place.”
While many residents will welcome the reopening of the emergency room Wednesday morning, Feldman stressed it is just the first step. “We hope to get the Certificate of Need by the spring.”
Last month HUMC filed a Certificate of Need application with the State Department of Health and Human Services to obtain the transfer of all of the former
Pascack
Valley
Hospital ’s licenses and open a full service 128-bed acute care hospital on the site.
In anticipation of the hearing, expected sometime in mid-November,
Pascack
Valley officials have been collecting signatures for a petition stating the community’s need for a hospital in the area.
Birkner reported that as of this week, the town has collected nearly 7,000 signatures, including ones from an electronic petition on the borough’s Web site.
He also stated that the
Bergen
County league of municipalities recently passed a resolution supporting the transfer of the Certificate of Need. “The response we’ve been getting from the community and the support from all the municipalities has been great.”
Birkner remained confident that the emergency room is just the beginning of gaining a full-service hospital and added that input from concerned residents will be vital in the process.
“There’s a lot of progress is being made. We’ve had a tremendous outpouring of support. All of the residents I think understand that they have ownership of this process. In the end, it will really be the residents that have a say in whether we get our hospital back.”
Touro University College of Medicine’s offices were closed this week due to Rosh Hashanah and a spokesperson could not be reached for comment.
Megan Burrow's e-mail address is burrow@northjersey.com.
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