Maimonides opens new children’s emergency room

Nine-year-old figure skater Hunter Birchfield was practicing a move called “shooting the duck” — crouching low on one leg with the other extended forward — when a mistimed turn sent her crashing to the ice.

“Accidents happen, and when they do, you need a doctor now, and you want the best possible care so your child can get back in the game of life,” said her mother, Rev. Roxanne Birchfield. For her family, that care came from Maimonides Children’s Hospital, Brooklyn’s only children’s hospital and pediatric trauma center.

Hunter has since made a full recovery, and this week, she was on hand as Maimonides unveiled its expanded Children’s emergency department at 4802 10th Avenue. The ribbon-cutting marked the opening of Brooklyn’s first standalone pediatric emergency facility, a child-friendly space four times the size of the previous unit.

“Knowing there’s a specialized children’s ER in Brooklyn, it feels like a luxury,” said Birchfield, a Midwood resident. “I can get in my car and drive here. I don’t have to put my injured kid on a train into the city.”

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams spoke of an early-morning rush to find the best care when his own daughter had a medical emergency. A quick search led him to Maimonides, where he says they received “amazing care from amazing people.” Williams praised the new facility’s timing, especially in an era of tightening healthcare budgets.

“It’s an honor to be at a place that’s not just saying, ‘we’re going to keep providing healthcare,’ but ‘we’re going to expand,’” he said. “When people are in that two-o’clock-in-the-morning moment with their most precious gift… they’ll know there’s an emergency room just for them, just for their children.”

City and state officials echoed that sentiment. “We don’t have to run to Manhattan, to Mount Sinai. You have it in your backyard, and it’s the best,” said District 46 Councilmember Mercedes Narcisse. She called the new center a model that should be replicated across Brooklyn.

State Senator Stephen Chan, a former NYPD officer, marveled at the new space. “In all my 27 years as a cop, I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “It’s about the same size, if not bigger, than a regular emergency room. I’m sure they’re going to do a lot of great work, they already do, but this is going to help our children down the road.”

For doctors like Dr. Hector Vazquez, a pediatric emergency physician at Maimonides since 2007, the new space means better care for his patients. The old pediatric ER had just eight beds and often saw more than 100 children a day. “Patients were being seen in hallways,” he said. “Now we have space for private conversations without waiting, and room for our patients to breathe.”

The new pediatric trauma center includes 32 treatment rooms, 100 new staff members, six pediatric emergency medicine fellows, and 11 attending physicians – with more on the way. “We anticipate a surge in patients coming here,” said Dr. Alexander Arroyo, director of the pediatric emergency department. “We’re well equipped now, but as volume increases, we’ll need more doctors on hand to match it.”

The upgrade also benefits adult patients. As the children’s ER moves to its own building, a renovated administrative floor, the former pediatric space will be converted into expanded capacity for adults. “It’s a great trickle-down effect,” said Dr. Eitan Dickman, chair of emergency medicine. “It won’t completely solve crowding, but it will reduce the number of people waiting on stretchers in hallways.”

The facility’s $50 million transformation, nearly a decade in the making, was funded through a mix of city and state allocations, HUD grants, and philanthropic donors. It features state-of-the-art equipment, animal-themed exam rooms, an art installation titled “The Horses of Sable Island” by photographer Roberto Dutesco, and iPads in every room to help distract and comfort young patients.

Serving Brooklyn’s 630,000 children and their families, especially those in Sunset Park and other diverse neighborhoods where English isn’t always the first language, the new ER includes on-site interpreters for common languages and video translation for more than 100 others.

“This is the hospital for Sunset Park,” said Dr. Vazquez. “I speak Spanish, luckily, so that's helpful for our Spanish-speaking patients who are very much from this area. But a lot of our schools are from this area also, so we see the kids that come from those schools. It's just a great opportunity for the people of Sunset Park to have a place to go to for the best care of their children.”

Hunter, who described her original visit as “interesting, scary, and fun,” gave the new space a glowing review and was especially excited by the room art and tablets. But she added, with a laugh: “I’m not getting any ideas to break my leg again.”

Sunset Park parents can take heart knowing that this new facility is standing by 24/7 should their child need it. As Rev. Birchfield put it, “We have to make sure that our children – they’re 100% our future – are invested in. If we don’t invest in our future, what are we doing as humans?”