Within the next few years, ground may be broken on a new University Hospital in Newark.
There’s a half-million dollars in Governor Murphy’s 2022 budget for the planning phase.
Hospital CEO Dr. Shereef Elnahal said this is badly needed.
“We’ve had two major floods that have caused us to disrupt care, cancel appointments, have been really expensive to mitigate in terms of the risk of mold growth,” he said. “That is a very involved process in restoring the facilities not to mention the equipment that the floods damaged.”
The building is 42 years old and the hospital says it can’t support a lot of modern medical procedures.
Elnahal said they can’t do certain heart operations there because they just don’t have the facilities.
“For example a hybrid operating room,” he said, “which is needed for a lot of the more advanced procedures related to intravascular work that happens in the operating room in combination with open procedures, trans-aortic valve replacements.”
Elnahal said the aging facilities have cost the hospital patients.
“Being licensed for over 500 beds and only operating 150 beds fewer than that is reflective of that,” he said. “I think unfortunately there’s been this sense of a need to divest some services and curtail services because they weren’t seeing as much of a demand.”