Maimonides Medical Center, Brooklyn’s largest hospital, is expanding their emergency services across the borough to ensure that all Brooklynites can have better access to emergency medical care — and they’re now setting a new standard for healthcare in the Big Apple.
The hospital has been working on broadening their reach of care for some time now, with a new emergency center opening in Maimonides Bay Ridge at the former Victory Memorial Hospital opening in May.
This new center will include 22 treatment bays as well as x-rays, CT scans, ultrasounds, laboratories and the pharmacy all on site.
“We have a very advanced practice of emergency medicine,” Dr. John Marshall, Chair of Emergency Medicine at Maimonides Medical Center said to Brooklyn Paper on March 31. “We pride ourselves on staying very up-to-date and bringing all faculty forward as we sort of advance the practice of emergency medicine [and] we have fairly robust research infrastructure. Every one of our attending physicians goes through training days once every three months to ensure that they’re either learning the skills necessary or reinforcing skills.”
Maimonides Medical Center had the busiest trauma center in 2022, emphasizing the necessity to expand upon services. Within the past year, Maimonides Midwood Community Hospital introduced a team of all board-certified Emergency Medicine physicians.
The emergency care expansion includes dramatically expanded medical capabilities within pediatric, orthopedic, OB-GYN and behavioral health care and the addition of a new cardiac catheterization lab opening later this year.
“When my doctors came in, we recognized this need to be able to really have this ability to upgrade the level of care that was being provided,” Dr. Moshe Weizberg, Medical Director of the Emergency Department, told Brooklyn Paper. “To be able to do that we really needed to elevate the level of equipment, technology and devices that were there to make sure that we were able to provide that sort of care.”
Maimonides Medical Center has historically been ahead of the curve when it comes to providing Brooklyn with access to excellent medical care.
The center operates the borough’s largest hospital-based 911 ambulance fleet, created both an adult and Brooklyn’s only pediatric trauma center back in 2016, created Brooklyn’s only ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) center of excellence — which proved vital in helping Brooklynites combat the COVID-19 pandemic with the long-term lung and heart machines saving many critical patients.
Maimonides has also repeatedly come out on top as one of the nation’s best hospitals for cardiac care, with the center performing the first successful heart transplant in the country in 1967.
Improving community wellness through emergency service is a priority for Maimonides Medical Center as well as providing overall care. For the service expansion at the new emergency center, this means ensuring patients won’t need to go to multiple emergency rooms in order to allow access to care unless their condition necessitates it.
“If I was going to describe our philosophy for what we’re doing at Bay Ridge, we really want it to be a showcase of best practices in compassionate patient-focused care,” said Dr. Marshall. “We do our best to try and make sure that when patients leave, that we’ve coordinated with their doctor or that if they need a referral to a specialist, that we actually make sure they leave with an appointment rather than having to go and find a doctor for the new condition.”
The honor of caring for the community on an even larger scale is also certainly not on Maimonides Medical Center physicians.
“It’s certainly an awesome responsibility to know that we are being entrusted to care for patients at their sickest,” said Dr. Weizberg. “When I took this job two years ago, I told them that my goal was I want this emergency department to become the Amazon Prime for these departments and that remains my goal. We want to provide timely care that is of a high quality in an environment where patients can feel as comfortable as somebody could feel in an emergency department.”
Continued planned expansion on emergency services at Maimonides Medical Center include Brooklyn’s first standalone pediatric emergency department opening in 2024 as well as an expansion on emergency adult psychiatric care system-wide.
For more information on Maimonides Medical Center, visit their website here.
