Mount Sinai Eye & Ear Nurses Rally for Layoff Plan as Beth Israel Shutdown Looms

With weeks to go until Mount Sinai Health System’s planned July 12 shutdown of Beth Israel Hospital, nurses at a sibling facility on Manhattan’s East Side are in the midst of bargaining a new contract for higher salaries.

They’re also negotiating a layoff plan for if and when the health system closes their place of work, the New York Eye & Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai.

Mount Sinai is proposing to turn its Eye & Ear Infirmary, an ambulatory center on 14th Street off Second Avenue, into an urgent care center after Beth Israel closes, Mount Sinai CEO Brendan Carr wrote in a May 17 letter to lawmakers.

Nurses rallied outside the East Village facility on Tuesday, seeking to push management back to the table after their most recent contract expired on April 30. The roughly 60 nurses employed at Mount Sinai Eye & Ear are represented by the New York State Nurses Association.

John Paul Montemayor, an operating room nurse and the bargaining unit’s president, told THE CITY that Mount Sinai “hasn’t promised anything in terms of reassigning or relocating” nurses if Eye & Ear closes. As far as the current contract negotiations, the union and management have also not reached an agreement on the nurses’ demands for raises, enforceable staffing ratios or a layoff plan since their most recent bargaining session on May 6, he added.

“We could reinvent this place to be an infirmary for everybody, but Sinai’s saying that they just don’t have the money – that it’s going to take millions of dollars to revamp this place,” Montemayor said.

Mount Sinai spokesperson Lucia Lee said in a statement that the health care system “is negotiating in good faith with the goal of reaching an agreement that honors our skilled nurses and ensures that patients receive excellent care.”

“Thanks to our nurses and the NYEE community for their patience as we work toward a resolution,” she added.

Concerns among staff and community members about Mount Sinai Eye & Ear’s closure have been swirling for years.

In 2022, Mount Sinai began distributing the ambulatory center’s services to other locations in order to merge its operations with Beth Israel. At the time, Mount Sinai denied it was shutting down the facility, and asserted that it was instead taking on a “on a multimillion dollar plan to strengthen and modernize all NYEE programs and services by moving them into new and newly renovated ambulatory settings.”

Last September, Mount Sinai asked state officials to approve of its plan to close Beth Israel on July 12, 2024, citing financial and staffing troubles – a plan that was shut down by the state Health Department as “ incomplete ” and blocked by a judge.

The hospital system resubmitted their closure plans to the state last week — one that will reportedly include turning the Eye & Ear campus into an urgent care center. That plan is still pending a review from the state Health Department.

The union claims nurses at Mount Sinai Eye & Ear are the lowest-paid nurses in the Mount Sinai system, a disparity that grew even wider after nurses at several other Mount Sinai facilities successfully struck and won higher wages in January 2023.

Though staffing had not previously been an issue, nurses say, many have quit and vacancies have gone unfilled with Mount Sinai Eye & Ear’s future in limbo.

“This used to be a workplace where management was supportive, collaborative, and would celebrate everyone through milestones, anniversaries and retirements. Now it is a workplace of insecurity and rumors of closure,” nurse Teresa Moriarty, who has worked at Eye & Ear for 17 years, said during the rally. “It’s very hard to maintain nurses and safely staff our hospital.”

There is no upcoming bargaining date on the calendar, said Montemayor, the unit’s president.

The proposed urgent care facility would be open seven days a week and offer more services than an ordinary urgent care center, such as ultrasounds and CT scans, wrote Carr in his May 17 letter to lawmakers. Mount Sinai also pledged to give an unspecified amount of funds to nearby New York City Health + Hospitals/Bellevue after Beth Israel’s closure so the public hospital can renovate its emergency department in order to accommodate a higher volume of patients, Politico reported .

Health + Hospitals CEO Mitch Katz said during a March 5 City Council budget hearing that Bellevue will need to open more beds if and when Beth Israel closes.

Councilmember Carlina Rivera (D-Manhattan), among the elected officials pushing back against the hospital’s closure, was skeptical of Mount Sinai’s plan for an urgent care center in the current Eye & Ear facility — noting that the hospital system already owns and operates an urgent care center three blocks to its west in Union Square.

“An expanded urgent care center is not a replacement for a full-service hospital that is open 24/7 and can accept ambulances,” she told THE CITY. “We can’t rely on Bellevue for everything. It’s not feasible.”

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