“Major trustee, please prioritize.” For years, NYU's emergency has secretly given priority to donors, trustees, politicians, celebrities, and their friends and family.
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NYU Langone denies putting VIPs first, but 33 medical workers told The New York Times that they had seen such patients receive preferential treatment in Room 20, one of the largest private spaces in the department. One doctor was surprised to find an orthopedic specialist in the room awaiting a senior hospital executive’s mother with hip pain. Another described an older hospital trustee who was taken to Room 20 when he was short of breath after exercising.
At NYU Langone, one of the country’s preeminent medical institutions, some doctors said that process had been upended. Some residents — doctors in their first years of practice — complained to the national organization that accredits medical training programs. The frustrations included NYU’s “special treatment” of trustees, donors and their families, according to documents reviewed by the Times. The group’s subsequent investigation confirmed that some doctors “felt pressured to see VIP patients first” and that they “experience a sense of fear and intimidation and retaliation for not expediting VIP patient care.
NYU’s chief of hospital operations, Dr. Fritz François, denied that the hospital favored donors, trustees and other prominent patients. He said that patients received treatment based on how sick they were, regardless of their wealth or status, and that the ER treated many low-income and homeless patients.
Angelo Roefaro, a spokesperson for Schumer, said the protocol for the senator’s security detail was “to have the senator stay, whenever possible, in a secure location.” A lifeline came from Langone, the founder of Home Depot and chair of the hospital’s board of trustees. He and his wife donated $100 million in 2008, matching a contribution they had made eight years earlier. The medical center was renamed NYU Langone.
“Suddenly, we started getting these phone calls that X person is coming in, they are X relation to board member, and we were given the strong sense that you had to push them to the front of the line,” said Swaminathan, who worked in the ER at the time. And ER workers at several elite academic medical centers said in interviews that, as at NYU, administrators sometimes requested expedited treatment for well-connected patients.
Doctors said they were sometimes required to carry a hospital-issued iPhone that, among other things, was logged into an email chain that alerted them to incoming VIPs. “I didn’t have to wait around for long hours for someone to come talk to me as happens in other emergency rooms,” said Bernard Schwartz, who said he had donated more than $30 million to NYU Langone. “I think that’s for all patients.”
Another time, at the instruction of a hospital administrator, a VIP patient with asymptomatic COVID was seen by pulmonology and infectious disease specialists who had to be pulled away from sicker patients, according to two medical workers with direct knowledge of the case. In October 2019, Dr. Joe Bennett was at the end of what’s known as a shift-change huddle, updating his colleagues on the patients he was handing off, when a frustrated VIP approached him. The VIP demanded that a family member immediately receive a CT scan, according to a doctor who witnessed the encounter and two others who were briefed on the matter.Soon after, Bennett was put on probation for what NYU said was a lack of professionalism, according to the three doctors.
At a heated staff meeting that month, a senior doctor said Carmody’s forced departure appeared to be the result of a complaint from “a VIP person that was connected to higher-ups,” according to a recording of the meeting. The doctor added, “The clear message is anybody can be taken down.” A worker checked the man’s vital signs. He was offered Tylenol and discharged, according to an email that a senior nurse later sent to more than 200 colleagues detailing what had happened.
Doctors and nurses described a pattern in which homeless patients — surefire money losers for hospitals — sometimes received cursory care, even as privately insured patients with similar symptoms were admitted for urgent treatment. The pressure from nurses works: Paramedics who work on public ambulances said that instead of taking drunk or homeless patients to NYU, they routinely dropped them off at Bellevue, which is staffed in part by NYU residents.
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