Long Island Jewish Forest Hills has proposed a $10 million overhaul of its emergency room, a significant investment in a department that has served the neighborhood for decades. The plan marks the latest sign that Queens hospitals are racing to modernize emergency care as the borough's medical facilities grapple with demand that has outpaced their original designs.
News of the $10 million plan comes from Crain's New York, which reported the project this week. The announcement follows years of public funding commitments aimed at the same emergency department. Back in 2023, the Queens Chronicle reported that the New York City Council had earmarked $3 million for renovations and expansion at the Forest Hills emergency room.
That 2023 report also detailed additional financial backing for the effort. Northwell Health, which operates the hospital, agreed to match the City Council's $3 million, and then-Queens Borough President Donovan Richards earmarked another $1 million for the project, according to the same account. At the time, hospital executive director Lorraine Chambers Lewis said the funding would go toward creating more space for both low-acuity and critical-care patients, along with redesigned isolation rooms for patients with airborne illnesses.
A Department Built for a Different Era
Chambers Lewis framed the renovation as an update long overdue. The emergency department, she said, was originally built to meet the community's health care needs that existed then, coinciding with the hospital marking its 70th year of providing care in Queens, the Queens Chronicle reported. No construction timeline was available when that reporting came out in 2023.
The gap between those earlier funding pledges and the newly reported $10 million figure from Crain's New York is not addressed in available reporting, leaving the relationship between the two unclear. What is evident is that Forest Hills is not alone in confronting an aging emergency infrastructure built for patient volumes that no longer reflect today's reality.
Other Queens Hospitals Are Expanding Too
Just a few miles away, Jamaica Hospital Medical Center recently completed the first phase of its own emergency department expansion, adding roughly 15,000 square feet of new space and 22 critical-care beds, according to QNS. That hospital says its annual emergency patient volume has doubled from an originally planned 60,000 patients to 120,000. It received a $150 million New York State grant and announced the construction project in 2023. The expanded facility, slated to open in early 2027, is expected to handle up to 150,000 annual visits once complete.
Northwell has undertaken a comparable project elsewhere on Long Island. In 2025, Long Island Jewish Valley Stream Hospital announced its newly renovated emergency department, though parts of the project were still in final renovation phases and the final stage was slated to begin in early 2026. The $31.3 million reconstruction expanded the department from 9,600 to 16,168 square feet, according to Northwell Health. That renovated department now includes 40 patient beds and intake rooms, along with two new X-ray suites and a dedicated CT scanner, and is designed to accommodate 55,000 patient visits annually.
A Longer History of Emergency Room Growing Pains
Emergency room overcrowding in the Long Island Jewish system is not a new problem. Back in 2007, the New York Daily News reported that Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park was undertaking a three-stage, $35 million project to transform what was then described as an aging and undersized emergency department, which at the time saw about 65,000 patients annually, a figure that had grown roughly 5% a year for most of the previous decade. The first stage of that project, per the same account, was an 18,000-square-foot addition meant to more than double the department's size.
Citywide, emergency room strain has become a broader talking point. A September report citing data from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that the combined average wait for hospital admission after an emergency room visit across New York City's private and public hospitals stood at 3 hours and 27 minutes, according to the Brooklyn Eagle. Against that backdrop, the planned investment at Forest Hills adds to a wave of emergency department upgrades across Queens and Long Island, even as the scope and schedule of the hospital's $10 million overhaul remain to be fully detailed.
