No Urgent Care Center for St. Vincent’s

A dispute over money and Catholic birth control doctrine has scuttled plans for an urgent care center to open at St. Vincent's Hospital, the pioneering HIV/AIDS institution in New York City that closed this year.

According to The New York Times, the urgent care center will open in Chelsea, eight blocks north of the shuttered hospital on 12th Street in Greenwich Village. The move leaves the immediate area, which has a large LGBT population, without vital emergency services of the sort St. Vincent's provided to Lower Manhattan during the 9/11 attacks.

St. Vincent's officials had been unable to agree upon the terms of a lease with North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, according to the system's chief executive, Michael J. Dowling.

"North Shore was also concerned, he said, by the insistence of St. Vincent's officials that because the urgent care center would be in a facility with Roman Catholic ties, clinic workers would not be able to discuss birth control, abortion and other options that might involve church doctrine with their patients," reported the Times.

The last remaining Catholic hospital in the city, St. Vincent's closed in April after filing for bankruptcy with a $1 billion debt. The 161-year-old hospital became closely associated with HIV/AIDS because of its location on the front lines of the early epidemic.