NYPD's Doctors Face More Than Just Injuries

It was the beginning of a long weekend for the NYPD medical unit as two of its surgeons stood in a tête-à-tête in a hospital hallway. Nearby, the family of a police officer who was severely injured in an auto accident days earlier watched their every move.

The doctors, Dr. Eli Kleinman, the NYPD's chief surgeon, and Dr. John Romanelli, an orthopedic surgeon, had decided the critically hurt officer would have to be transferred to another hospital to receive life-saving surgery. But they risked exacerbating his injuries during the ride along potholed city streets, and the doctors weren't sure he would make it.

The action picked up from there. As other New Yorkers were packing their bags for the July 4th holiday weekend, NYPD doctors rushed to the scene where an officer had injured himself while jumping over a car in pursuit of a suspect; responded to an attempted suicide and to one that was successful, and stood at the bedside of an officer with acute appendicitis.

By Monday, there would be with another death — the only incident to make headlines — when a suspected drunk driver ran over an off-duty officer, Alexander Felix, as he was riding his motorcycle in Manhattan. The week finally ended with his funeral today.

"People may not be aware how often police officers get injured," Dr. Kleinman said, noting that the highway patrol had whisked the surgeon on duty Sunday night from hospital to hospital without a break during the 14-hour overnight shift. "It's never a dull moment."

Since the 1930s, the NYPD has maintained a medical unit of its own part-time doctors to tend to the health care of its officers. In recent years, the unit has grown to include a cadre of 300 honorary expert surgeons from around the state beyond the 31 who work for the department on staff.

Officers have health insurance and can choose their own doctors. But any time an officer is injured, or even calls in sick with a cold, the NYPD surgeons make note of it in an expansive database, make an appointment to see the officer, and occasionally visit them at home.

"This is sort of an additional layer," Dr. Kleinman said. "We oversee the health care that they're getting, and throw our two cents in if it's necessary."

In fact, the unit was originally formed in order to police the police. Under their labor contract, police officers are granted unlimited sick leave — a policy meant to ensure that officers feel up to the daily physical rigor of their job, but also one vulnerable to abuse by officers faking illness.

"They decided they needed to have some kind of control mechanism," Dr. Kleinman said.

The enforcement aspect of the police surgeons' job has won them the enmity of some police union officials.

"They are not there, as one would expect, to ensure the well-being of their patients," the president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the largest police union, Patrick Lynch, said in an e-mailed statement. "But instead, they exist as a technical alibi used by the NYPD to put officers back to work regardless of their condition."

In a series of articles running this year in the union's magazine, a lawyer, Michael Murray, is attacking the NYPD surgeons for what the union calls their "conflict of interest."

Last month, police surgeons tried to visit an officer who had been hospitalized , only to be turned away by family members.

Dr. Kleinman says the medical unit is there to help. It has vast resources: The staff surgeons, whose salaries are commensurate to those typical to their field, specialize in cardiology, hematology, emergency room medicine, obstetrics, and vascular and pulmonary problems, while the 300 honorary surgeons cover about every other medical specialty.

In emergencies, Dr. Kleinman said, their joint expertise can help save an officer's life.

"If we have somebody who has to have microsurgery, we have no problem taking that person out of the hospital elsewhere, as unpopular as that might sometimes be, and bringing them to the place where the microsurgery team is," he said. In other cases, all the surgeons can do is deploy grief counselors, as they did this week following Felix's death.

At the hospital on Thursday where the injured officer lay waiting for transport, the surgeons — having consulted with three honorary surgeons from elsewhere in the city — finally came up with a solution. (The officer's name has been withheld to comply with patient privacy rules). They rigged up a makeshift harness to hold the officer stable on his stretcher, a process that took two hours and left the nerves of the family members teetering on the edge.

Then, as the paramedics lifted the stretcher into the ambulance, Dr. Romanelli realized the harness wouldn't be good enough. He climbed in, holding the unconscious officer in his arms to steady him as the ambulance inched out of the hospital parking lot.

Hours later, the officer was operated on at the new hospital.

"He came through it well," Dr. Kleinman said. "But he's got a long road ahead of him."