New York University / Bellevue Hospital Medical Center

Bellevue Hospital, founded in 1726, is the oldest public hospital in the United States and the flagship of New York City's municipal hospital system. It is the principal teaching hospital of the New York University School of Medicine, founded in 1841. NYU physicians have been providing care at Bellevue since the early 1800s.

Bellevue Hospital Center:

Bellevue handles nearly 500,000 outpatient clinic visits, 100,000 emergency patients, and some 26,000 inpatients each year. It provides ambulatory care for 300,000 patient visits in more than 90 adult and pediatric ambulatory care clinics. Bellevue’s Geriatric Ambulatory Care Program is the largest in the nation, caring for more than 5,000 seniors every year. Other innovations include a microsurgery center, a regional center for brain and spinal cord injuries, a wide range of behavioral health programs, world renowned psychiatric services.

Bellevue’s Emergency Service is an internationally recognized model for ER development, and serves as a training ground for NYU physicians in medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and psychiatry. At the beginning of their third year, NYU medical students receive training in advanced cardiac life support through the division of Emergency Medicine at the Emergency Care Institute.

Additionally, the Hospital has a newly established comprehensive Cancer Center that is entwined with the NYU School of Medicine Lynne Cohen Cancer Screening Clinic for High Risk Women funded through the Lynne Cohen Foundation for Ovarian Cancer Research, a unique nonprofit foundation that raises funds for cutting-edge medical research in the women's healthcare field. The foundation, created in 1998 in memory of Lynne Cohen, is dedicated to finding an early detection test for ovarian cancer, to establishing high risk symposiums for women with family members who have been diagnosed with ovarian and/or breast cancer, and to finding better Clinical treatments for women struggling with the disease.

More than 85 percent of Bellevue’s patients come from the city’s medically underserved populations; 80% are people of color which is more than 20% higher than that of the NY population. In volume and diversity, in urgency and cultural complexity, Bellevue Hospital Center offers a rich array of medical and human challenges. The result is an optimal clinical setting for NYU School of Medicine’s training of medical students, physicians, nurses and other health care workers to provide the best possible service to those in need of care.

NYU School of Medicine traces its roots to 1841. As the Medical College of the University of New York, it admitted its first class of 239 students to a four-month course of lectures conducted by the six professors on the faculty. Over the years, the medical enterprise evolved. The old Bellevue Hospital Medical College, established in 1861, was merged in 1898 with New York University Medical College to form the University and Bellevue Hospital Medical College. The combined institutions became known as New York University College of Medicine in 1935. In 1960, the name was changed to NYU School of Medicine. In 1968, the NYU School of Medicine assumed full responsibility for clinical services at Bellevue Hospital Center

NYU physicians helped to establish at Bellevue Hospital, the nation’s first outpatient department, as well as departments of rehabilitation medicine and forensic pathology. NYU physicians at Bellevue were the first to identify Kaposi’s sarcoma as an early symptom of AIDS in 1983. Today, the School has 1,388 full-time faculty and 3,477 part-time faculty, with 61 endowed professorships. There are 660 medical students, 15% of which are students from historically underrepresented and underserved communities. The School also has 1,060 residents/fellows, 80 M.D./Ph.D. candidates, and 4,979 post-graduate students.

From the start, the Medical School and its graduates have been at the forefront of medical education, scientific research, preventative medicine and patient care. Two alumni, Drs. Jonas Salk (’39) and Albert Sabin (’31), developed vaccines for polio, and one of our faculty members, Dr. Saul Krugman, helped to develop a vaccine for Hepatitis B. While affiliated with NYU, Dr. Howard Rusk, for whom our world-renowned Rusk Institute is named, pioneered the field of rehabilitation medicine following World War II. The school also counts among its faculty and alumni three Nobel laureates: Dr. Severo Ochoa, who conducted landmark studies in biochemical genetics and nucleic acids; Dr. Baruj Benacerraf, who performed groundbreaking research on genetic regulation of the immune system; and Dr. Eric Kandel (’56), who made outstanding contributions to understanding basic mechanisms of the nervous system and received the 2000 Nobel

The longstanding NYU-Bellevue affiliation defines the School's mission of public service and also represents the premier collaboration in the United States for global and urban medicine and community partnerships thereby providing the a rich historical precedence for the partnership with the Breast Treatment Task Force through The NYU School of Medicine Institute for Community Health.

The Institute for Community Health serves as a major source of health promotion to New York City’s underserved and disenfranchised communities through partnerships with key community and faith based organizations to provide education, training, technical assistance and leadership development in promoting excellence and cost-effectiveness in health screenings and service delivery. The Institute builds partnerships and linkages that stimulate public and private sector investment in the delivery of quality health care services to these communities. Through, education, data collection, health assessments, screenings and advocacy, the Institute and partners address key issues affecting New York City’s underserved populations.

The Center for Immigrant Health, NYU School of Medicine, was created in 1989 to facilitate the delivery of linguistically, culturally, and epidemiologically sensitive health care services to newcomer populations, and to decrease health disparities. The Center is a coalition of health care providers, health services researchers, administrators, policy makers, and community members and advocates that has grown to include over 1,000 members. A critical national and local voice in immigrant health, the Center accomplishes its mission through health promotion and education; community-based participatory health services delivery, research, and evaluation projects; advocacy; and cultural competence and interpreter training and model program development. Overarching all of the Center activities is a focus on linguistic and cultural competence, and on health care access. The Center has spearheaded a number of groundbreaking projects in health insurance and eligibility, linguistic access, cultural responsiveness, technology and immigrant health, tuberculosis control, nutrition, cardiovascular disease prevention and intervention, cancer services and research for immigrant minority populations, and minority health workforce expansion and training. The Center for Immigrant Health, the recipient of numerous service and research awards, directly serves over 10,000 community members and trains over 2,000 health care providers and staff each year. Rich partnerships with immigrant community-serving organizations have been fundamental to the Center successes.