Mount Sinai South Nassau, a hospital in Oceanside serving the south shore of Long Island, broke ground last week on a four-story expansion of its emergency department.
The new, $130 million addition will double the size of the hospital’s emergency unit, adding 40 critical care beds and nine surgical suites, hospital officials said. It is part of Mount Sinai South Nassau’s ongoing, $400 million expansion project and is expected to be completed in 2023.
“We are preparing this hospital for the next [generations],” said Richard J. Murphy, the hospital’s president and CEO. “No hospital on Long Island will be able to compare to the kind of facility we have and the kind of technology we provide our physicians for the care of their patients.”
Local elected officials gathered with hospital leaders, as well as some grateful patients, to break ground at the construction site of the new, 100,000-square-foot J-Wing of the hospital last week, including Nassau County Executive Laura Curran.
“I am incredibly reassured by what I am seeing here today,” Curran said. “This is great for the south shore, but this is also great for the entire county, and I would say the whole region.”
Dr. Adhi Sharma, the hospital’s chief medical officer and executive vice president, said patients who arrive at the hospital are generally older with advanced diseases, requiring more critical care beds that this project will provide. The need for ICU beds is expected to double as the number of patients needing intensive care is currently on the rise, according to the hospital.
“We did revisit all of the drawings to make sure that any lessons we learned from Covid could be applied to the design,” Sharma said. “And this way, this building would be future-proof in that way.”
The hospital’s emergency department treats about 65,000 patients annually but is designed to handle only 35,000, officials noted. The design will also feature separate entrances for walk-in patients and patients transported by ambulance, as well as a larger ambulance docking bay to facilitate the triage of patients from ambulances.
The new addition’s surgical suites will also be more spacious to allow for sophisticated diagnostic equipment to be located directly in the operating rooms, officials said. The new operating suites also could pave the way for an open-heart program at the Oceanside campus, pending approval from the state department of health.
In November 2020, Mount Sinai South Nassau also broke ground on a $35-million, 15,400-square-foot medical arts pavilion in Long Beach near the site of the former Long Beach Medical Center. These projects are being partially funded through a 2015 grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
To learn more about the hospital’s expansion projects, visit southnassau.org/sn/fema-projects.
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