Bellevue Hospital Center

NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue
NYC Health + Hospitals
The original Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital building
Geography
Location	462 First Avenue, New York, NY, United States
Organization
Funding	Public hospital
Hospital type	Teaching, psychiatric
Affiliated university	New York University
Services
Emergency department	Level 1 trauma center
Helipad	East 34th Street Heliport (IATA: TSS)
Beds	1,500 (1,160 general, 340 psychiatric)
History
Founded	March 31, 1736
Links
Website	nyc.gov/bellevue
Other links	Hospitals in New York

NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, formerly Bellevue Hospital Center, was founded on March 31, 1736 and is the oldest public hospital in the United States. Located on First Avenue in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, Bellevue Hospital is also home to FDNY EMS Station 08, formerly NYC*EMS Station 13.

It handles nearly 670,000 non-ER outpatient clinic visits, nearly 116,000 emergency visits and some 26,000 inpatients each year. More than 80 percent of Bellevue’s patients come from the city’s medically underserved populations. The hospital currently occupies a 25-story patient care facility with an ICU, digital radiology communication and an outpatient facility. The hospital has an attending physician staff of 1,800 and an in-house staff of about 5,500.

Bellevue was renamed in November 2015 as a reflection of its parent organization's rebranding.

Bellevue traces its origins to the city's first permanent almshouse, a two-story brick building completed in 1736 on the city common, now New York City Hall. In 1798, the city purchased Belle Vue farm, a property near the East River several miles north of the settled city, which had been used to quarantine the sick during a series of yellow fever outbreaks. When the grid system of streets was established in 1811, the survey had to take the hospital into account, and the placement of First Avenue on the grid is mainly due to the location of Bellevue. The hospital was formally named Bellevue Hospital in 1824.

By 1787 Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons had assigned faculty and medical students to Bellevue. Columbia faculty and students would remain at Bellevue for the next 181 years, until the restructuring of the academic affiliations of Bellevue Hospital in 1968. New York University faculty began to conduct clinical instruction at the hospital in 1819. In 1849, an amphitheater for clinical teaching and surgery opened. In 1861, the Bellevue Hospital Medical College, the first medical college in New York with connections to a hospital, was founded. By 1873, the nation's first nursing school based on Florence Nightingale's principles opened at Bellevue, followed by the nation's first children's clinic in 1874 and the nation's first emergency pavilion in 1876; a pavilion for the insane—an approach considered revolutionary at the time—was erected within hospital grounds in 1879. For this reason the name "Bellevue" is sometimes used as a metonym for psychiatric hospitals. Bellevue initiated a residency training program in 1883; it is still the model for surgical training worldwide. The Carnegie Laboratory, the nation's first pathology and bacteriology laboratory, was founded there a year later, followed by the nation's first men's nursing school in 1888. By 1892, Bellevue established a dedicated unit for alcoholics.