Mount Sinai gets recognized for its commitment

Mount Sinai South Nassau’s Emergency Department has been awarded the prestigious 2024 Lantern Award by the Emergency Nurses Association for reducing wait times and for demonstrating commitment to exceptional and innovative performance in leadership, practice, education, advocacy, and research.

Mount Sinai South Nassau’s Fennessy Family Emergency Department, which handles some 70,000 patient visits annually, along with the emergency departments at Mount Sinai Morningside and Mount Sinai West, are three of only 94 emergency departments across the United States that met the Lantern Award criteria this year. In addition to The Mount Sinai Hospital, which received the award in 2023, four Mount Sinai Health System Emergency Departments now hold the award. The award is named in honor of Florence Nightingale, a trailblazing nurse and founder of modern nursing who was known by the nickname “Lady with the Lamp.”

“Mount Sinai South Nassau’s Emergency Department has been transformed in recent years to better serve the hospital’s patients,” said Adhi Sharma, president of Mount Sinai South Nassau. “The Lantern Award is an objective, third-party validation of everything the Emergency Department team has been doing, especially the nursing staff, which is on the front line of around-the-clock patient care every day. I congratulate the Emergency Department nursing leadership, nurses, physicians, and staff for this significant achievement.”

The Emergency Nurses Association is the premier professional nursing association dedicated to defining the future of emergency nursing. Founded in 1970, the organization advocates for patient safety, develops industry-leading practice standards and guidelines, and guides emergency health care public policy.

To earn Lantern Award designation, Mount Sinai South Nassau completed a rigorous application process that included in-depth quantitative measurements focused on patient outcomes as well as comprehensive documented examples that prove its commitment to both patient care and the staff’s well-being. The award will be displayed in the Emergency Department as a symbol of the staff’s commitment to quality, safety, and a healthy work environment.

Mount Sinai South Nassau Emergency Department nurses, in collaboration with Jay Itzkowitz, MD, Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine, implemented a series of innovations that helped to improve a key measurement of Emergency Department patient satisfaction and performance. While experiencing a significant increase in post-pandemic patient volume, the Emergency Department simultaneously reduced the “left without being seen” patient rate to below 2 percent. Two years ago, that rate was nearly 7 percent.

The Emergency Department also focused on staff development and nurse retention, with more than 40 nurses graduating from an intensive Nurse Residency Program that helped bring nursing vacancies to zero and the turnover rate to 1 percent, ensuring that patients receive care from a dedicated and fully staffed team.

The Emergency Department is the only Level 2 Trauma Center on Nassau County’s South Shore and is a New York State Department of Health-designated regional Stroke Center. One of the busiest hospital emergency rooms in Nassau County, it serves more than 900,000 residents from eastern Queens to western Suffolk County. The department’s staff includes board certified, residency-trained emergency medicine physicians as well as nurses and physicians’ assistants who have been specially trained in emergency medical care.