North Shore Long Island Jewish Health System formed a partnership with VillageCare to open an urgent care clinic on 20th Street between Sixth and Seventh avenues, replacing the existing Adult Health Care Center.
According to Terry Lynam, vice president of public relations for North Shore-LIJ Health System, the clinic will be a 24-hour urgent care center.
"The benefit is that we promote primary care opportunities for patients we are seeing in the urgent care," Lynam said. "The patients we are seeing have less severe injuries and illnesses.
Your child has a sore throat or fever, bring him or her in. That is the type of patients we are seeing at urgent care, as opposed to those having a heart attack or stroke, which require a higher level of care and need to be treated more properly."
He added that the new facility would "reduce the pressure on the local emergency departments that do not rise to the true emergency."
North Shore-LIJ originally wanted to open its center in what was formerly St. Vincent's Hospital, but the negotiations didn't work out, allegedly due to differences in religious dogma. St. Vincent's officials insisted the clinic operate under Catholic guidelines, such as not offering birth control counseling.
Yetta Kurland, a lawyer who filed a lawsuit against St. Vincent's Hospital earlier this year, questioned the validity of those reports.
"It doesn't sound plausible because the hospital no longer exists," she said. "The Catholic Church has no decision power. The trustee and the judge are in charge of that."
North Shore-LIJ said they were pleased with their agreement with VillageCare.
"Rather than locate the urgent care center in temporary space at St. Vincent's Catholic Medical Center, we are pleased to partner with VillageCare to provide a long-term home for the facility eight blocks away," Michael J. Dowling, president and CEO of the North Shore-LIJ Health System, said in a press release.
