Thursday, October 1, 2026
Last April, hundreds of people crowded a meeting at City Hall and called on South Nassau Communities Hospital and state Department of Health representatives to make full use of $154 million in FEMA funding for health care services in Long Beach by reopening a hospital that would meet the needs of the barrier island’s approximately 37,000 residents — a population that can swell to 100,000 or more in the summer months.
South Nassau said it intends to construct a medical pavilion with an emergency department on the former Long Beach Medical Center campus, using a portion of the FEMA funds, though the facility will not operate as a full-service hospital, which many residents have called for.
South Nassau announced this week that it was moving forward with its plan to build the 25,000-square-foot Medical Arts Pavilion at a cost of $40 million, following an independent study that concluded that a full-service hospital on the barrier island would not be sustainable, and would lose money every year.
Members of the Beach to Bay Central Council of Civic Associations, which has been advocating for the FEMA funds to be invested in a hospital, have cited increased travel times and bridge delays when patients are transported to SNCH, a demand for specific medical services and the negative economic impact the hospital’s closure has had on the community.
Barbara Bernardino, a co-founder of Beach to Bay, said that the group was moving forward with a lawsuit against FEMA, claiming that the funding was meant for Long Beach. “We feel it’s inappropriate to use the FEMA money in the way that South Nassau intends to use it,” Bernardino said. “We’re going to challenge that and take that to a federal court. The FEMA money was originally awarded to Long Beach Medical Center to rebuild a hospital.”
Until the medical center closed, city officials have said, most patients on the barrier island were taken there. Trauma patients, however, were transported to either SNCH or Nassau University Medical Center, while pediatric medical emergencies were directed to South Nassau and burn patients to NUMC.
Stroke patients, however, were transported to LBMC, but will continue to be taken to South Nassau. SNCH officials maintain that the hospital’s new free-standing emergency department in Long Beach is capable of stabilizing and treating patients before transferring them to another hospital, if necessary.
But Beach to Bay claims that a free-standing emergency facility is inadequate, and cannot accept ambulances with patients with any of nine “time critical” medical conditions, including trauma, stroke and isolated hip fractures, and that the proposed medical pavilion will not have hospital beds.
