While walking down 7th Avenue, your readers may wonder, “What exactly is that gleaming, white, ship-shaped building towering over the street?” You may notice the emergency signs and think perhaps it is yet another new urgent care center.
Let me be perfectly clear: Lenox Health Greenwich Village is no urgent care center, despite how it is occasionally characterized in the WestView News. The landmarked building has undergone massive renovations since Northwell Health acquired the property in 2011. Opened two years ago, it is the home of Manhattan’s first and only freestanding Emergency Center. Its clinical capabilities go far beyond the care delivered in an urgent care center. It’s the same level of care you would get in a hospital emergency department, except that it is not a trauma center. However, as evidenced by the recent terrorist bombing in Chelsea, our Emergency Center has become a vital community resource, treating nine of the 29 individuals who sustained injuries from the explosion.
We are investing more than $150 million in this facility because we recognize the hardships that this community has endured due to the closure of St. Vincent’s Hospital and we want to help fill the gap in the healthcare services needed in this community.
Health Greenwich Village Executive Director Alex Hellinger
(left) and Northwell Health President and CEO Michael
Dowling in front of Manhattan’s first and only freestanding
Emergency Center. Photo Credit: Northwell Health.
Our Emergency Department is open 24/7/365 and cares for all patients regardless of their ability to pay. We have seen almost 70,000 patients in our first two years alone. We’ve administered clot-busting medications to patients with strokes. We’ve provided critical care to hundreds of patients with heart failure, COPD, aneurysms, respiratory failure, pneumonia, influenza, diabetes, allergic reactions, and more. We’ve sutured thousands of lacerations. We’ve cared for hundreds of psychiatric patients and thousands with drug, or alcohol-related, emergencies.
But Lenox Health Greenwich Village is more than just an Emergency Department. This July, we opened a new, state-of-the-art, $16 million, 13,000-square-foot Imaging Center on the building’s fifth floor. Now residents will not need to travel outside of their community for diagnostic radiology services. Northwell Imaging offers a full range of services including: magnetic resource imaging (MRI)—including new 4D cardiac imaging, which is something no other facility can offer—CT scans, ultrasounds, digital x-rays, 3D digital mammography, and breast biopsies.
Later this year, we will open an Ambulatory Surgery Center with six operating rooms. We will also be opening physician offices and a beautiful new conference room space that will be open for community use.
We believe in and support this community. We are sponsors of the Greenwich Village Little League and LGBT Sports League, and contributed funds to renovate the LGBT Center. We open our doors for innumerable tours of the facility, administer free flu shots, offer CPR classes, and routinely perform health screenings at various health fairs.
In short, we’re part of the fabric of this community and we encourage your readers to find out for themselves how we can meet their health needs, now and in the future. We invite them to stop by, visit our website or call (646) 665-6000 to learn more about our facility.
—Alex Hellinger, Executive Director of Lenox Health Greenwich Village
