Community project funding/congressionally directed spending - construction - ST

Barnabas hospital (SBH) is an acute care, safety net anchor institution located in the bronx, NY. We are a community hospital with 422 beds, and average 75,000 adult and pediatric emergency room visits, 126,000 specialty clinic visits, 187,000 methadone maintenance treatment program visits, and 5,000 ambulatory surgeries annually. The hospital predominantly serves a medicaid and uninsured population with only 5% of patients commercially insured. The hospital houses a level II trauma center (one of two in the bronx) and stroke center. Additional services include medical/surgical, maternity, pediatric, geriatric, behavioral health emergent care, a center for sleep medicine, and a hospice. The hospital had a total of 13,966 inpatient discharges during 2021, and 13,647 discharges in 2020. SBH's mission is to improve the health and wellness of our community and provide the highest quality care in a compassionate, comprehensive, and safe environment where the patient always comes first, regardless of their ability to pay. Our community has experienced generations of disinvestment and has historically faced widespread poverty, health, and socioeconomic challenges, as well as fewer healthcare resources. There is a chronic shortage of physicians, so much so that the health resources and services administration designated our community as a medically underserved area. As a result, our patients bear the burden of high chronic disease (including diabetes and asthma). The pandemic further exacerbated our community's health and socioeconomic issues. One of the many lessons of the pandemic is the importance of urban hospitals in poor communities and the role we play as the broader region's first line of defense. This $1,350,000 congressionally directed spending: construction project will ensure that SBH's emergency department has an updated computerized tomography scanner (CT scanner) to provide state of the art care for our community's most vulnerabl e, at their greatest time of need.