Assemblyman Brian Cunningham addresses congregation at Fenimore Road United Methodist Church on Feb. 4.
Picture by Nelson A. King
SUNY Downstate is in crisis. Many years of underfunding and inadequate Medicaid reimbursement already strained Downstate when the medical heart was designated as a COVID-only hospital for 9 months.
Now, our group has been taken without warning with the information that our beloved hospital is slated for a “transformation” meaning diminished providers and misplaced jobs.
I’ve lived in Flatbush my entire life. Rising up, I used to be surrounded by people who labored, studied, and obtained care at Downstate. As a security web hospital, it’s a lifeline for my underinsured neighbors. It’s the largest employer in my district, offering hundreds of union jobs for members of my group. It even brings new enterprise to the outlets and eating places within the surrounding neighborhood.
However Downstate is a lot greater than an financial driver — it’s a important software within the battle towards long-standing injustices plaguing Black communities.
SUNY Downstate is house to the one kidney transplant heart in Brooklyn, with an industry-leading kidney care program. African Individuals are three times as likely as white sufferers to face kidney failure, simply as we’re extra generally impacted by different power situations. It ought to go with out saying that the lack of these assets will devastate our group.
As a brand new father, and as somebody who understands all too nicely the struggles that Black families experience with maternal health, the maternity ward and neonatal ICU at Downstate maintain particular that means to me. Shedding these services shall be nothing wanting a tragedy for the households who will lose moms and infants to an absence of care.
Downstate can also be house to an industry-leading orthopedic care facility and rehabilitation heart that allow efficient harm restoration and scale back the incidence of long-term incapacity. A 2023 review discovered that Black sufferers usually tend to require further surgical procedure, keep within the hospital longer, and report solely minor enhancements of their situation after knee substitute.
Are you noticing a development? Black sufferers usually tend to see unfavorable well being outcomes in each power and acute settings.
Specialists agree that these outcomes are usually not attributable to genetic variations. Unequal entry to wholesome meals, boundaries to preventive care, and the ever-present social stressors of discrimination and poverty put Black sufferers at considerably increased threat of power sickness and untimely loss of life. Compounding these situations, our healthcare system is just not consultant of our nation’s racial make-up.
A sturdy workforce of Black healthcare employees is important if we’re to remedy long-standing health disparities in well being for Black sufferers. Cultural competency saves lives and reduces the influence of bias on healthcare outcomes, such because the all-too-common expertise of docs doubting the extent of African American patients’ pain.
Let me be clear: a discount of providers at Downstate can have a deleterious impact on healthcare, not solely in Central Brooklyn, however on Black and brown communities throughout New York. College students of shade comprise 68 percent of the student body, and Downstate is within the 93rd percentile nationwide for African American graduates. Drawing down the scope of Downstate Hospital will take away important alternatives for Black sufferers to obtain care from practitioners who appear like them and perceive their distinctive wants, undoubtedly worsening the racial divide in well being outcomes.
But regardless of the essential, lifesaving care that Downstate Hospital offers, my neighbors and I perceive totally that the established order just isn’t sustainable. Power underinvestment has left Downstate’s infrastructure crumbling for years. Subpar services lead many sufferers to hunt care elsewhere, even leaving the borough completely to go to healthcare suppliers. In consequence, the hospital is additional disadvantaged of vital income, making a snowball impact that has exacerbated the state of affairs over time.
We want daring options to protect Downstate Hospital and save lives. Final spring, lengthy earlier than anybody was conscious of plans to cut back the scope of providers at Downstate, I launched a invoice to develop a sustainability plan for the medical heart. As considerations mounted over the proposed closure this 12 months, Senator Kevin Parker and I launched legislation making a assist fund to gas infrastructure enhancements, group well being initiatives, analysis grants, and extra. Moreover, I’ve joined my colleagues in supporting Medicaid reimbursement reforms that may present sustainable income for our security web hospitals.
Brooklyn can not afford to lose healthcare assets. If the state attracts down the hospital’s features, our most susceptible group members will face even increased boundaries to healthcare entry than they already do. In the meantime, hundreds of good-paying, union jobs will disappear, leaving households in dire straits at a time of record-high dwelling prices and accelerating gentrification.
We want all fingers on deck to protect and develop look after communities of shade. I urge all my fellow New Yorkers to contact your elected representatives and inform them: from Brooklyn to Buffalo, New York wants SUNY Downstate.
Brian Cunningham represents New York’s 43rd Meeting District, together with the SUNY Downstate campus and the encompassing communities of East Flatbush, Prospect Lefferts Gardens, and Crown Heights.
