Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, a 303-bed hospital serving mostly low-income patients in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, has stopped admitting patients as it pushes ahead with a plan to shut down most inpatient care by the end of the month.

Now five years in the making, the move is a condition of a state-backed merger between Kingsbrook, Interfaith and Brookdale University medical centers, which are now collectively known as One Brooklyn Health. The partial closure was supposed to occur last July but was delayed due to the high demand for hospital beds after the city began its battle against COVID-19.

Since then, the plan has faced renewed opposition from community members and hospital staff who hoped to permanently stave off Kingsbrook’s transformation into a “medical village” with an increased focus on outpatient care. The hospital will be cutting about 200 beds overall.

“There’s been a huge evolution [in health care], not only in how people are treated with different conditions but where they’re treated,” LaRay Brown, CEO of One Brooklyn Health, said at an online community forum on the plan last week. As an example, she pointed out that people with HIV once occupied hospital beds but are now largely treated on an outpatient basis.

But staff at Kingsbrook hospital say it was bustling before officials recently started winding down their inpatient operations.

“The area is going to suffer a whole lot,” said Dr. Subhash Malhotra, who has worked at Kingsbrook since the 1980s. “When the patient is acutely ill, and they require inpatient hospitalization and care, you cannot provide them with the outpatient clinic.”

Kingsbrook’s emergency department will remain open, but patients who need to be admitted to the hospital will now be directed elsewhere in One Brooklyn or to other facilities in the area. Of the 66 patients who arrived at Kingsbrook in need of inpatient care between June 9th and 16th, Brown said 54 were transferred to Brookdale or Interfaith, each about a 10-minute drive away.

During the forum, some members of the Kingsbrook Community Action Committee, a coalition of hospital staff and community members who have sought to stop the plan, questioned the wisdom of cutting hospital beds in an area lagging in COVID-19 vaccines while new variants of the coronavirus are still emerging.