By JOSEPH KELLARD
His weight dropped eight more ounces and he turned blue before doctors and nurses at South Nassau saved his life, Skelos told some 25 hospital staff and administrators in a conference room in the north wing last week.
"That's why South Nassau is so special to me - because of the great services they have provided over the years," Skelos said. "And that's why Senator [Charles] Fuschillo and I will be supportive of the hospital in whatever way we can, so we can continue to bring the quality of care that everyone in the community deserves."
To show their appreciation, the senators presented a $500,000 check to Joseph Quagliata, South Nassau's president and CEO, and to Dr. Jason Freeman, director of interventional cardiology. The grant will be earmarked for the hospital's ongoing project to expand its intervention cardiology program.
The money, allotted to the senators out of the discretionary portion of the state budget, will go toward the hospital's cardiac catheterization laboratories. When completed, South Nassau's project will sport a 32,000-square-foot interventional cardiology suite comprised of three state-of-the-art cardiac catheterization labs, two new electrophysiology laboratories, where patients will be implanted with pacemakers and defibrillators, an 18-bed preparation and recovery room for both emergency and routine angioplasty procedures, and a cardiology office and examination suit for outpatients. It will also include decentralized nursing stations, doctors' offices, family waiting areas, conference rooms and all associated support spaces.
Quagliata and Freeman said the expansion of the cardiology unit is needed to meet the hospital's goal of providing more advanced, high quality care to South Shore residents with cardiovascular diseases, the leading causes of death in the United States. According to the American Heart Association, one in three adults has some form of cardiovascular disease, and 41 percent of all deaths in Nassau County can be traced to some form of heart disease.
"This will help us offer more extensive health care services to local residents and improve our already high level cardiac care operations," Quagliata said about receiving the senators' grant. Quagliata added that projects such as the expansion could not be done without the assistance of Skelos and Fuschillo.
Freeman said that South Nassau is the only South Shore hospital able to provide advance comprehensive cardiac care, providing both emergency and non-emergency angioplasty, which is used to unblock clogged arteries in the heart and often makes invasive procedures, such as open-heart surgery, unnecessary.
"I expect South Nassau to continue to be the leader of the South Shore of Nassau County in this area," Freeman said. "We also are expanding in peripheral angioplasty and peripheral stenting for our patients that have peripheral vascular disease, which is rampant among our elderly population. So this grant is a huge benefit to the patients of Nassau County."
In early 2007, the New York State Department of Health (DOH), in its report on patient outcomes in cardiac surgery and interventions, awarded Freeman with its highest ranking of double asterisk status for his success rate in angioplasty.
When South Nassau Communities Hospital opened its $93 million, five-story north wing addition in early 2006, hospital officials were already planning to establish a state-of-the-art medical facility for heart care services in the units that were vacated and moved to the new wing.
That July, South Nassau was selected by the DOH to participate in a statewide pilot program that allows selected hospitals without open-heart surgical programs to perform elective angioplasty. South Nassau is the only community hospital in Nassau County - and one of only five in New York state - permitted to perform angioplasty on an elective or non-emergency basis.
The hospital's cardiac initiative began in October 2006, with the launch of its elective coronary angioplasty program. South Nassau successfully performed its first elective angioplasty on Oct. 16. During the following five weeks, doctors at the hospital performed more than 40 elective angioplasty procedures and more than 175 cardiac catheterization procedures, hospital officials said.
Construction on the current project began in January 2007 and is slated to be completed in early 2008. Soon after, the second phase of the project will begin, consisting of a third cardiac catheterization laboratory, an electrophysiology laboratory and a minor procedure room.
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