After 50M renovation, an expanded emergency department opens in Oceanside Long Island Business News

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After a $50 million renovation, Mount Sinai South Nassau now has a new, expanded emergency department.

The Fennessy Family Emergency Department, which opens officially on Wednesday, is part of the hospital’s new, four-story, 100,000-square-foot Feil Family patient pavilion, which, when it opens this spring will include nine new operating rooms and 40 new critical care suites.

“With this opening, we are taking emergency medicine on the South Shore to a new level,” Dr. Adhi Sharma, president of Mount Sinai South Nassau and an emergency medicine physician, said in a news release about the new Emergency Department.

“Every aspect of this Emergency Department, from the entrance to the waiting area to the reception and triage areas to the patient treatment rooms, has been designed to provide our patients with advanced emergency care and a first-rate experience,” he said. “From the private exam rooms to a ventilation system that uses outside air, we learned from the pandemic and applied those lessons to the design of this new space.”

With an eye towards improving patient experience, the new emergency department was designed to  reduce wait times, and features 54 private exam rooms.

The new emergency department is the size of a football field, hospital officials said, and has the capacity to see about 75,000 patients each year. It features centralized nursing stations for direct oversight of patient rooms, bedside triage, and a trauma unit with an adjoining radiology bay.

Designated a Level II Trauma Center by the American College of Surgeons, the Emergency Department’s new trauma suite, which opened in 2023, includes three spacious care bays to facilitate the flow of trauma team members as they care for patients with life-threatening injuries.

The new Emergency Department is named in recognition of Joseph Fennessy, a major benefactor and the hospital’s former longtime board chair.

Hospital officials say that more than $10 million of the renovation cost was funded by community donations during a five-year capital fundraising campaign.

And, funded in part through the Federal Emergency Management Agency, after Hurricane Sandy, the Feil Family Pavilion is designed to enhance access to healthcare on the South Shore. The pavilion is part of an initiative to foster the resiliency of the hospital’s Oceanside campus in the event of another Sandy-like event.

The Emergency Department’s main entrance for self-transported patients has moved from Washington Avenue to the east side of Oceanside Road, south of Oswald Court and north of Nassau Parkway.