America’s oldest public hospital, Bellevue opened in 1736. It soon became home to the nation’s first maternity ward, hospital-based ambulance service, emergency pavilion, and outpatient department. In 1873, the nation’s first school of nursing was established there. In 1968, the School of Medicine assumed full responsibility for clinical services at Bellevue.

As the flagship facility of New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation, Bellevue handles nearly 500,000 outpatient clinic visits, 100,000 emergency patients, and some 26,000 inpatients each year. It provides ambulatory care for 300,000 patient visits in more than 90 adult and pediatric ambulatory care clinics, and its Geriatric Ambulatory Care Program is the largest in the nation, caring for more than 5,000 seniors every year. Bellevue’s innovations include a microsurgery center, a regional center for brain and spinal cord injuries, and comprehensive pediatric services. Bellevue also boasts the nation’s largest array of behavioral health programs, and its psychiatric services are world-renowned. More than 80 percent of Bellevue’s patients come from the city’s medically underserved populations. No one in need is ever turned away from Bellevue.

In volume and variety, in urgency and complexity, Bellevue Hospital Center offers a rich array of medical and human challenges. The result is a uniquely challenging and rewarding clinical setting for the training of medical students, interns, and residents.

As the core of NYU’s teaching program, Bellevue is the primary location of clinical instruction for NYU medical students and is also a significant hub of research. NYU students receive much of their third-year clinical clerkship education at Bellevue, and many fourth-year students complete subinternships and participate in clinical electives there. Bellevue’s Emergency Service is an internationally recognized model for ER development, and serves as a training ground for NYU physicians in medicine, surgery, pediatrics, and psychiatry. At the beginning of their third year, NYU medical students receive training in advanced cardiac life support through the division of Emergency Medicine at the Emergency Care Institute.

Today, the hospital occupies a 25-story patient care facility, with a state of the art ICU, digital radiology communication and a new modern outpatient facility. The hospital has an attending physician staff of 1,800 and a house staff of more than 1000.