City partially funds longshot Rockaway trauma hospital proposal
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Officials pushing the trauma hospital in Rockaway are celebrating a $25 million funding allocation included in the city budget last week. Councilmember Selvena Brooks-Powers/X
By Ryan Schwach
When Mayor Eric Adams announced the city had made a budget agreement last Friday, he chose to highlight one specific budget note in one specific Queens neighborhood; the Rockaway peninsula trauma center.
A trauma center – or more medical infrastructure in general – for the Rockaways has been a steady and repeated rallying cry for locals for more than a decade, and a specific priority for its councilmember, Selvena Brooks-Powers.
Brooks-Powers and the trauma hospital received $25 million from the city’s budget last week, plus another $80,000 to work on scoping. It’s a minimal amount in the grand scheme of the ambitious project, but it’s a major first step, officials said.
“We are going to make sure this trauma facility is done,” the mayor said. “It's unbelievable when you think about it, the peninsula and even in parts of South Jamaica, Queens doesn’t have the health care facilities that they deserve.”
The $25 million infusion, which only accounts for 0.022 percent of the city’s colossal $112 billion Fiscal Year 2025 budget, will also only account for a portion of the estimated $200 million price tag necessary for constructing the hospital, which still currently lacks a location, operator or the proper certifications.
Calls for the hospital have kicked up since the closing of Peninsula Hospital in 2011, and with no trauma center in Rockaway, locals need to travel relatively far off the peninsula to get care.
Most often, victims of trauma like gunshot and drowning victims, the latter of which an all too common occurrence in the beach community, go to Jamaica Hospital.
Jamaica has a level one trauma center, the highest level, but is a 10 mile drive from the center of the peninsula closest to the bridge. It is an even more lengthy drive for kids, who are often taken to Cohen Children's Medical Center in Glen Oaks, an 18 and a half mile trip.
Changing that has been a main priority for Brooks-Powers, who in 2022 spearheaded the creation of a task force to determine the trauma center’s viability and to make plans for its eventual construction. In June, the task force released a somewhat vague report that didn’t answer a host of questions, including where a trauma center would actually go.
The 24-page report mostly summed up a lot of what was already known about the desire to bring a level one trauma to the peninsula, including resident polling data to back it. Despite the lack of detail, Brooks-Powers still called it a milestone in the battle for the center.
This week, Brooks-Powers is celebrating the next step with the funding, which brings the total allocated money for a trauma center up to $50 million, with the other half coming from a pot designated for the Downtown Far Rockaway Rezoning project.
“It required a lot of communication and focus, because there were a lot of pressing issues in this budget,” she said. “The Council was laser focused on clawing back a lot of cuts that were made to critical services across the city and not losing sight of that.”
“[It was] communicating with the mayor directly and his team,emphasizing this is something that has to be done, and to the mayor's credit, he recognized that,” Brooks-Powers added.
Funding however, is only one aspect of what needs to be figured out for a trauma center to come to Rockaway.
All trauma centers, no matter the level, need to be certified by the American College of Surgeons Committee on Trauma or another entity determined by the state, according to the state’s codes, rules and regulations.
That certification is determined by the quality of the center, as well as the number of trauma cases the center would take. As of now, people close to the project say Rockaway falls short of that number, but Brooks-Powers says it will get closer as the local population continues to grow, and once other populations are factored in.
“Based on the data the task force was able to identify while we may fall short of that number, we are not that far off from that number, and potentially at the number if you were to factor in the Jewish community, who currently do not go to St John's and do not necessarily rely on FDNY EMT,” Brooks-Powers said. “The reality is, we are a quickly growing community…Rockaway is one of the fourth fastest growing communities. The census shows that we grew by eight percent in the last census.”
Brooks-Powers says they plan to work with the state to stress the importance of the center, and why Rockaway stands as a unique case as a geographically isolated community.
“We wanted to make sure that we were united and that we showed strength when we come to the table with this so the governor recognizes so much of a priority this is,” Brooks-Powers told the Eagle. “We've already begun engaging the governor's team, and we're looking forward to the coming weeks to start having those talks.”
However, high-ranking officials close to the trauma center worry that Rockaway will never have enough people to reach that certification, regardless of any population increase.
They also worry that even if Rockaway does qualify, it may only reach the threshold of a level two or lower facility, which potentially would not even be capable of helping in cases of drownings and shootings, two of the incident types often cited as why a trauma center is ultimately needed in Rockaway.
Another unanswered question is where a center will go, and who will operate it. For a long time, the hope was that Episcopal Health Services, who operate the Rockaways’ only hospital, St. John’s, would take it under control.
However, EHS’s own reports in the past have tended towards hesitancy and worries it would cost too much even if it gets necessary certifications.
However, EHS’s newly appointed CEO, Dr. Donald T. Morrish said that the health care provider does support the trauma center venture.
“EHS, St. John's Episcopal Hospital is in support of the councilmember's efforts to fund a trauma center in the Rockaways,” Morrish said in a statement. “As a geographically isolated peninsula, experiencing a community need for trauma services, we are poised to partner with the councilmember in this effort….We will continue to work with the taskforce to create solutions that will enhance trauma care in the Rockaway community.”
The task force's report does highlight a NYCHA-owned piece of land in the heart of the peninsula where the center could go, but nothing is currently underway to secure that as a possible location.
That $200 million price tag also only accounts for the construction of a center, and not for the ongoing costs to staff and maintain a 24-hour emergency medical facility.
While those questions remain, Brooks-Powers said that they plan to make other announcements in the coming weeks, and still want to stress the importance of getting the project across the finish line.
“Reality is we need our trauma facility, so we're trying to all work together, pull our resources together so that we're creating an overarching health system that will meet the needs of this quickly growing community,” she said.
