University Hospital in Newark at a crossroads, prepares to split from UMDNJ

By Kelly Heyboer and Dan Goldberg/ The Star-Ledger

NEWARK —The well-worn automatic door between the waiting room and emergency room at University Hospital in Newark swings open with a weary whir.

Inside, the nearly 50 beds in the hospital’s frenetic emergency department are full as doctors and nurses dart from bay to bay. Every few minutes, the door swings open again. And again. And again.

“About 100,000 people walk through this door every year,” Vincent Barba, a physician and the hospital’s chief quality officer, said surveying the chaos on a Thursday afternoon. “This is a quiet day.”

University Hospital and its predecessors have been sitting on this Newark hilltop since the 1880s. The hospital is such a fixture in the state’s largest city that residents can’t imagine it not being there.

The hulking concrete complex serves not only as North Jersey’s only Level 1 trauma center, but as a teaching hospital, research center and neighborhood doctor’s office for most of the region.

Now, University Hospital is about to undergo the biggest change in its history. On July 1, the 519-bed hospital will split from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and become its own entity.

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