For $1,700-a-night, you too can receive the “Beyonce” treatment at Lenox Hill Hospital’s ultra posh maternity ward for the 1%. The rest of the 99% population will have to deal with the norm at Lenox Hill, which includes overworked nurses, a nurse baby ratio of 18:1, and life without plush carpet and flat screen televisions.

The executive suites at Lenox Hill provides mothers with their own private nurse, which has left the hospital scrambling to reassign the already overworked nurses in the regular ward. “It’s incredibly stressful,” one nurse who’s worked at Lenox Hill for decades told the Daily News. “You have too many babies. You can’t do all you need to do for them.”

The Daily News cited an example of how preferential treatment is given to those in the executive suites. A woman staying in a suite delivered in the middle of the night, and the hospital had to pull not only one, but two nurses out of the general nursery. That left only one nurse covering 18 babies. By contract, nurses aren’t supposed to care for more than eight babies at once, said Eileen Toback, chief of staff of the New York Professional Nurses Union. With these issues happening, the union is in talks to call a strike.

Apparently these executive suites are a way to bring in more money to the hospital. Last year the hospital ran up a $19 million budget gap and is $7 million in the hole so far this year. The smallest “deluxe private” room goes for $850, the larger “premium deluxe” goes for $1,400, the biggest one — the Beyoncé Room — goes for $1,750. And that can be expanded into two suites for a cool $2,400 per night. “Go ahead and make money — but don’t make money at the expense of everyone else,” said the nurse, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

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5 Comments

  1. I sure hope this is a private hospital. I guess, “when you got It like that, you got it like that.” But please not at a publicly funded hospital???

  2. I’m in nursing school now and this is absolutely sick! Care for her should be the same for all of the mothers on that floor. If i worked there I would def be looking for another job. Nursing is about CARE ! She could have hired a Private Duty Nurse.

  3. This article has nothing to do with Beyonce. They r using her name because she had the biggest room. Stop it. This child will be 1 soon. Really? It seems as though this happens when anyone is in a room where they are paying extra. It’s not the person’s fault that they can afford it, it’s the hospitals fault for under staffing.

    • @Grey: yes! This is all to be said about this whole situation!

      • @Cake211: You’re absolutely right, Grey and Cake. It’s the hospital’s fault for failing to staff properly. Beyonce and people like her pay megabucks to be pampered, and they have the right to spend their money on frills like this. You and I could also waste our money in that fashion, if we chose. If the hospital chooses to offer these pampering services, it needs to staff adequately for them. The state department of health needs to intervene so that safe care is rendered in this hospital. This is the reason that nurses are joining unions–not over salary disputes, but over safe care for our patients!

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