Our History

The Libertas Center was founded as a volunteer program of the Emergency Department (ED) in 2006 by ED physicians, Dr. Lars Beattie and Dr. Rajeev Bais, to provide services to survivors of torture through Elmhurst Hospital’s Emergency Department, with a primary focus on conducting medical and psychological evaluations.

With grant funding, in March 2010, the Libertas Center opened dedicated space for its community healing center at Elmhurst Hospital to provide comprehensive medical, mental health, social and legal services for torture survivors. Together with Medical Directors Dinali Fernando and Braden Hexom, Program Director Leah Weinzimer helped develop relationships within Elmhurst hospital and throughout the community to build the Libertas Center’s structure, philosophy and suite of services that today comprise the central pillars of the program. 

our Setting

As the largest public hospital in the borough of Queens, Elmhurst Hospital (EHC) is the primary source of emergent and primary medical and mental health care in Queens. EHC is the major public teaching hospital affiliated with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS), with a broad spectrum of medical, surgical and subspecialty residency programs. It is an Emergency Medical Services (EMS) 911 receiving hospital, cardiac catheterization and stroke center, and Level 1 trauma center, with 575 hospital beds. In 2014, its Emergency Department (ED) cared for 148,406 patients (91,543 adult, 49,330 pediatric, 7533 psychiatric), with the EDs responsible for 77% of hospital admissions.

A 2009 cross sectional prevalence study of 470 patients conducted by the Libertas Center suggested that over 6% of patients seeking care at Elmhurst Hospital’s Adult Emergency Department met criteria as torture survivors, translating to several thousand torture survivors potentially presenting to our hospital Emergency Department every year. These numbers, along with the increase in survivors seeking services from our program since 2009, together with our growing waiting list, demonstrate the ongoing demand for Libertas Center services.