Remarks by Alan D. Aviles
President, NYC Health and Hospitals Corporation

Dedication ceremony of Kings County Hospital Ambulatory Care Pavilion with Mayor Bloomberg

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Let me begin by once again expressing our deep appreciation for your unwavering support of Kings County Hospital and the rest of our extraordinary public hospital system.

The progress made over the last five years in steadily improving the quality of care to our patients would have been impossible without the stable foundation provided by strong City support.

And when I say that the quality of care in our public hospitals here in Brooklyn has benefited from that strong support, I am not offering you my subjective opinion. I am merely echoing the quality of care data recently collected and made publicly available by the federal government and the NYS Department of Health.

For example, that quality data tells us which of Brooklyn’s 16 hospitals do the best job in following all the recommended best practices in the treatment of patients who suffer a heart attack or who come to us with congestive heart failure. In both of those important categories, the three highest ranked hospitals in Brooklyn -- according to the State Health Department’s publicly reported data -- are the borough’s public hospitals: Kings County, Woodhull and Coney Island.

This and other quality data confirm the excellent care now rendered to those patients treated in our emergency department and admitted to our hospital beds at Kings County.

At the same time, we have an activist agenda centered on our expansive ambulatory care services to promote good health in our community and reduce its burden of healthcare disparities.

Within the walls of this magnificent, newly renovated ambulatory care pavilion, we will immunize our children from disease. We will provide the early and effective prenatal care that further reduces infant mortality rates. We will run our smoking cessation clinics, and we will conduct the screening tests that detect heart disease, cancer and other deadly illness at an early stage when treatment is most effective.

And within these walls, we will engage our patients as partners in the effective management of their asthma, diabetes, hypertension and other chronic disease. And in the process we will continue to steadily improve the health of our community.

This state-of-the-art space, outfitted with advanced clinical technology, allows us to pull together under one roof all primary care and virtually all medical subspecialty outpatient services. It not only facilitates the delivery of more effective, efficient and patient-centered care, it also maximizes the convenience, comfort and dignity that our patients deserve.

Congratulations to all of the staff on this latest milestone in the renaissance of Kings County Hospital Center. You now have another physical space that is worthy of the noble work that you do each and every day.

Many staff at every level and from many departments have been involved in bringing this complex project to completion. Our thanks to all of you, as well as to our partners at the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York (DASNY). And special thanks go to Warren Hanson and his dedicated team who have worked tirelessly on this project with great pride.

Thank you as well to Senior Vice President, Phil Robinson, for your work on this project and our other major modernization projects across the system.

And finally, to one of our great senior leaders and the woman who has been the steady hand on the helm of this hospital for more than a decade, thank you Jean Leon for another major installment of the new Kings County Hospital Center --- brought in on time and on budget.

The Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the largest municipal hospital and health care system in the country, is a $4.9 billion public benefit corporation that serves 1.3 million New Yorkers and nearly 400,000 who are uninsured. HHC provides medical, mental health and substance abuse services through its 11 acute care hospitals, four skilled nursing facilities, six large diagnostic and treatment centers and more than 80 community based clinics. For more information about HHC, visit www.nyc.gov/hhc.