Influential Women of New York City
CIH’s fi rst female CEO looks back on COVID year
BY KEVIN DUGGAN
Svetlana Lipyanskaya became
the fi rst permanent female
chief executive offi cer of
Coney Island Hospital on Jan.
4, 2020, just weeks before the
COVID-19 pandemic began to
ravage the Five Boroughs.
The Ocean Parkway public
health center sits at the border
of Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend,
Brighton Beach and Coney Island,
neighborhoods that continue
to have some of the highest
infection rates in the city.
Lipyanskaya faced a unprecedented
fi rst year at the helm of
the southern Brooklyn facility,
which in addition to facing down
the pandemic is also undergoing
an almost $1 billion federallyfunded
campus expansion and
fl ood resiliency upgrades.
Brooklyn Paper sat down
virtually with Lipyanskaya
to talk about the challenges
she and her 3,400-strong staff
faced and how they persevered
through the COVID year.
Brooklyn Paper: You
started just weeks ahead of
the city’s COVID outbreak.
When did you fi rst realize
the threat of the virus?
Svetlana Lipyanskaya:
Right when I started, we were
already prepping on a system
level at New York City Health
+ Hospitals. Everybody was
watching what was happening
in Europe and there was still
a lot of optimism that maybe it
won’t really be here and it won’t
be so bad, but we should know
what we’re going to do if it does
come here. So there was a lot of
prep in January and February
It was very eery in a lot of
ways, because you knew it was
coming at that point, there was
no way around it. So it was
operations as usual, except
there’s a pandemic going on.
BP: How did that change
once COVID reached Coney
Island Hospital?
SL: In March, Elmhurst
was really being slammed. We
actually took patients from
them, so we were trying to redistribute
COURIER L 22 IFE, MAR. 26-APR. 1, 2021
patients around the
system to make sure that we
were able to really care for the
population of the city, not just
this neighborhood.
At one point we had 440 patients
in-house, that’s a huge
number for us. We are a 341-
bed hospital, so that’s not only
every single certifi ed bed that
we had but then another 100
above that. When we were being
hit really hard, other public
hospitals took patients from
us. This was one of those situations
where it really brought
our system as a whole much
closer together. We’ve been able
to manage the fl ow of patients
by leveraging the fact that we
are an 11-hospital system.
BP: Did that affect staff?
SL: We had staff who were
working 30-40 days in a row.
No matter how much staff we
were bringing in, it was just
never enough.
It was our staff, the ones
who were experienced and really
knew how we functioned
everyday, it was important
that they be the anchor and
they really stepped up. They
bonded together more than
they ever had before. Everybody
was going in the same
direction at the same time.
It was exhausting and scary
and horrible, but really heartwarming
at the same time because
these people really went
above and beyond.
When it’s in your house and
you are doing everything you
know how to do and you’re doing
more than you know how to
do, and it’s still not always helping,
I think you do lose some
of that innocence. It’s funny
to say because we’re talking
about adults who have spent
their career in healthcare.
BP: The area around the
hospital has some of the
highest positivity rates to
this day. How has that impacted
the hospital?
SL: We’re still continuing
to see people on a very regular
basis coming into our
emergency department with
COVID, or COVID symptoms,
so it hasn’t gone away here yet.
But because of all the lessons
that we learned the fi rst time
around, we know what to do.
If there’s a message I can
send to your readers it’s, ‘It’s
safe to get preventative care,
go back to your primary care
doctor, get that test that you
needed to get done and put off,
because it’s much better for
you to get care now when you
can do it safely than to wait
and then have a very acute episode
and then be sick. I run a
hospital, but my goal is to keep
people out of the hospital.
Editor’s Note: This interview
has been edited for brevity.
For more, visit BrooklynPaper.
com.
Coney Island Hospital CEO Svetlana
Lipyanskaya.
NYC Heath + Hospitals/Coney Island