Mount Sinai South Nassau plans to put its new Feil Family Pavilion on display Tuesday, giving visitors a glimpse of the Oceanside facility’s emergency and intensive care units and an update on the $161 million building project.
Along with Mount Sinai representatives, the dedication ceremony is set to begin at 11 a.m. and include community members, elected officials and Jeffrey Feil, who with his family, has donated more than $17 million to the hospital over the years, some of which has helped fund the four-story pavilion that bears the family’s name.
The expansion of the Oceanside hospital will “provide modern health care for decades,” including for Long Island’s growing senior population, hospital president Dr. Adhi Sharma told Newsday in a telephone interview Monday.
When the project is completed in May, it also will house enough new operating rooms to perform heart surgery — a procedure currently unavailable in southern Nassau County, Sharma added.
The 100,000-square-foot pavilion will have “all of our critical care services,” including a new intensive care unit, Sharma said. The expansion upgraded existing medical infrastructure that “was getting beyond its usable life” and became too small to fit larger, more advanced technology, from robotic equipment for minimally invasive heart and brain surgeries, to the ventilators on which the hospital relied heavily during the COVID-19 pandemic, Sharma said.
Plans for the expansion began 2016 when the hospital took over the bankrupt Superstorm Sandy-ravaged Long Beach Medical Center and secured $170 million in FEMA funding. A portion of those funds transformed part of the shuttered medical center into a freestanding emergency department. Another portion was used to fund the Oceanside pavilion along with contributions from donors like the Feil family.
“The ultimate beneficiary of the Feil family’s generosity is our South Shore community that relies upon Mount Sinai South Nassau for quality and increasingly advanced levels of health care,” Tony Cancellieri, co-chair of the hospital’s advisory board, said in a statement emailed to Newsday. “We are very grateful for his ongoing support.”
Feil, who heads the Feil Organization, a Manhattan-based real-estate firm his father Louis started, was not available Monday for comment.
The hospital’s existing operating rooms average between 200 and 300 square feet, a space too cramped for the bypass equipment required for open heart surgery, the hospital president said. The nine new operating rooms are 600 square feet each, capable of offering Mount Sinai patients in southern Nassau County an alternative to venturing elsewhere for the heart procedure.
The 40 new intensive care suites are larger than those in the hospital’s existing 22-bed ICU, Sharma said. They contain “alcoves” for a patient’s family to visit or stay overnight, even when doctors and nurses are providing care, he added.
“With advanced technology — ultrasound at the bedside, more intensive monitoring — we had no space for our families in the existing platform,” Sharma added of the old ICU. “In our existing space, if the team had to come in and do something with the patient, family had to step out. It just wasn’t enough space for the pumps, the IV medications, dialysis machines sometimes, the staff and the families.”
Intensive care is critical on Long Island “for keeping pace with the needs of the community,” Sharma said. The Island’s senior population has increased 24% from 2013 to 2023, Newsday reported this past summer. There are now more than half a million Long Islanders aged 65 years or older.
“Many of them are living in place, which is great, but their medical needs will continue to increase with each decade,” Sharma said. “Many of our senior patients require great care support when they have a critical intensive illness like sepsis or a stroke or a heart attack.”
Jeffrey Feil and his family have donated more than $17 million to Mount Sinai South Nassau over the years. An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated how the donated money was used.
Nicholas Grasso covers breaking news for Newsday. A Long Island native, he previously worked at several community newspapers and lifestyle magazines based on the East End.