Talk Bronx New York

Montefiore Medical Center Adds North Division

Former Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center Assets Acquired

Move Enhances Delivery of High Quality, Compassionate Healthcare to Community As Care and Services Continue

Montefiore Medical Center, one of New York City’s largest healthcare systems, today announced it has completed its acquisition of most of the assets of Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center (OLM). As a result of this acquisition, the former OLM becomes the North Division of Montefiore Medical Center.

The acquisition makes Montefiore a 1,491-bed academic medical center employing more than 16,000 associates serving the two million residents of the Bronx and Westchester County. There are no immediate plans for service changes and patient care will continue uninterrupted.

“We are enhancing the availability of high-quality, innovative healthcare and vital services in the Bronx and providing resources for our patients and the communities we serve,” said Steven M. Safyer, MD, President and CEO, Montefiore Medical Center.

“This preserves a location for healthcare delivery that the surrounding community has relied on for many years,” said Dr. Safyer.

Local residents now will have access to an even greater number of healthcare services in many more Montefiore locations throughout the Bronx and nearby Westchester.

“This is great news for the community,” said Congressman Charles B. Rangel, Chairman, House Ways and Means Committee. “At a time when people are increasingly worried about their healthcare options, local residents can rest assured that they are not just keeping services close to home, but are also getting the additional resources and management team of Montefiore Medical Center, one of our nation’s finest medical institutions.”

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Push in Bronx for H.I.V. Test for All

Dr. Donna Futterman, left, with Rosita Gonzalez and colleagues at Montefiore Medical Center, helped the city shape the plan.

The New York City health department plans to announce on Thursday an ambitious three-year effort to give an H.I.V. test to every adult living in the Bronx, which has a far higher death rate from AIDS than any other borough. The campaign will begin with a push to make the voluntary testing routine in emergency rooms and storefront clinics, where city officials say that cumbersome consent procedures required by state law have deterred doctors from offering the tests.

“Routine would mean if you came into the emergency room for asthma or a broken leg, we test everyone for H.I.V., if they’re willing,” the health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, said in an interview on Wednesday.

While Manhattan has long been the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic in New York, with the highest incidence of both AIDS and H.I.V., the virus that causes it, the Bronx, with its poorer population, has far more deaths from the disease. Public health officials attribute this to people not getting tested until it is too late to treat the virus effectively, thus turning a disease that can now be managed with medication into a death sentence.

Several AIDS experts said on Wednesday that the Bronx campaign was the most aggressive testing effort they could recall in the nation. Two years ago, Washington, D.C., made a high-profile push to test 450,000 residents, enlisting celebrity endorsements and distributing 80,000 free testing kits, but the campaign resulted in only about 45,000 people being tested.

“What’s new here is that we are implementing it on this large a level,” said Dr. Donna Futterman, director of the adolescent AIDS program at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, who helped New York develop the new program. “The Bronx has 1.3 million people. It’s bigger than most cities, bigger than Boston, bigger than Washington. We’re talking about a significant urban population.”

City officials estimate that 40 percent of the 830,000 people ages 18 to 64 in the Bronx have been tested for H.I.V. in the past year. Half of the remainder, about 250,000 people, have never been tested, and the goal is to test them first. Tests would be given at 40 designated sites, including clinics, community centers, churches and emergency rooms. Dr. Monica Sweeney, an assistant health commissioner for H.I.V. prevention, said the city had not set aside money specifically for the program, but would absorb the $12 cost of each test.

In organizing the campaign, which formally begins on Friday, Dr. Frieden has enlisted support from elected officials, health care providers and clergy members in the Bronx. But the proposal is raising some concerns.

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Green Car Service Zipping Into The Bronx

Another Manhattan luxury is making its way to the Bronx - and it’s eco-friendly.

Zipcar, the urban car share service, is bringing 12 cars to the borough that will be stationed in four parking lots. It has plans to have at least 20 more in three additional lots by summer’s end.

“We think New Yorkers everywhere need access to alternative transportation,” said Joel Johnson, general manager of the company. “Traditional services like rental car companies tend to shy away from areas underserved like the Bronx. We are open to serve the entire city.”

Zipcar already operates in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It has 200,000 members nationwide.

Unlike rental cars, the 12 Mini Coopers and eco-friendly hybrid Toyota Priuses in the Bronx can be reserved by the hour or day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Members reserve the cars online or by phone whenever they want, and have automated access to the cars using a “Zipcard” to unlock the door and drive away.

The four lots to first have the cars are located at 1020 Grand Concourse, 3000 Third Ave., 1752 Morris Ave. and 250 E. 188th St.

As part of the Bronx launch, Zipcar is partnering with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University to bring cars to its Morris Park campus and provide discounted memberships and rates to students, faculty and staff.

However, Johnson pointed out that the Zipcars, unlike the few rental car agencies in the Bronx, will serve a range of areas, instead of only areas near universities.

To join, drivers need to be 21 years old, have a valid driver’s license and no more than two moving violations or accidents in the past three years and no more than one in the past 18 months.

It costs $75 to join Zipcar. Rates for renting the car include the cost of insurance, maintenance, parking and gas. Rates start as low as $7.65 per hour and $68 per day.

In other cities, Zipcar members have gotten rid of their cars, and the hassle of owning a car in densely populated areas, by using the new option.

If the service is popular in the Bronx, it could expand to more parts of the borough, Johnson said.

“That’s the whole business model,” Johnson said. “As soon as the demand goes up, we put more cars in as fast as we can find the spaces to put them in.”

SOURCE: NYDailyNews.com Read more..

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Students Blogging About Health & How To Beat Obesity

A team of blogging schoolchildren may be the South Bronx’s newest weapon against diabetes and obesity.

The CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in Manhattan has been awarded a two-year, $50,000 grant to create blogs, interactive Web sites called wikis, and slide shows about the health crisis in the Bronx, focusing mostly on Hunts Point.

Graduate students will be guiding teams of students and community members from the South Bronx, who will write blogs about their lives and give tips to their neighbors on healthy eating and how to keep in shape using the resources of their community.

“Traditional consumer health journalism, with the detached voice of journalists and the middle-class experts they quote, is not a good vehicle for reaching the needy populations of the South Bronx,” said Trudy Lieberman, the school’s director of health and medicine reporting, who applied for the grant. “The top-down approach of traditional journalism is unlikely to be effective at getting overweight teens to lose weight and eat vegetables.”

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50,000 in the Bronx may be diabetic; many remain undiagnosed

Some 50,000 Bronxites are walking around with diabetes - and they don’t know it.

With Diabetes Awareness Month underway, that’s the estimate for the disease, which claims the highest rate of victims here than in any other borough.

“In a place like the Bronx, everybody knows someone who has the advanced complications of diabetes,” said Dr. Charles Nordin, professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and chairman of medicine at Jacobi Medical Center.

Nordin said anxiety over such complications as blindness, heart disease and amputation from poor circulation is partly responsible for the estimated high number of undiagnosed cases.

The estimate is from the city’s 2004 Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which found 3.8% of the adult population - about 207,000 people citywide - had undiagnosed diabetes.

But early detection, exercise, improved diet, medications and monitoring of blood-sugar levels are critical to delay or avoid the complications of diabetes.

“There are very effective treatments to prevent the complications,” Nordin said. “It’s very important to get out the message that diabetes is not a hopeless condition.”

In a 2003 study of screenings at Bronx churches, community centers, shelters and streetcorners, Nordin and colleagues found that 3 to 5%of about 800 people tested had undiagnosed diabetes. A 2006 survey of 1,000 patients at Jacobi found an estimated 6% were likely to have undiagnosed diabetes.

Besides fear, Nordin said barriers to diagnosis include not being aware of the early signs, such as frequent urination, extreme thirst, hunger and exhaustion, and no routine screening.

“It’s a very slow-developing disease,” said Carol Stockert, director of chronic illness management at the North Bronx Healthcare Network. “You don’t just wake up one morning and have diabetes. If you start to see any of these symptoms you need to go and see your doctor.”

The Bronx has a high prevalence of risk factors for diabetes, including the city’s highest rates of obesity, which is linked to the illness, and large black and Hispanic populations, which have a higher incidence of the disease.

In the South Bronx, where those risk factors are the highest, the city health department has launched several initiatives to prevent and manage the illness, such as free exercise classes at recreation centers, working with bodega owners to increase access to fresh fruits and vegetables, and raising awareness.

“If you don’t know you have the disease, you may not change your diet, you may not exercise,” said Dr. Shadi Chamady, director of the health department’s diabetes prevention and control program.

SOURCE: NY Daily News

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