Mount Sinai South Nassau breaks ground on $130M wing

On the morning of June 22, Mount Sinai South Nassau hospital celebrated the groundbreaking for its J-Wing on its Oceanside campus. The wing will serve as the cornerstone of hospital’s $400 million capital expansion to increase health-care services.

Projected to open in 2023, the $130 million J-Wing will stand at four stories and 100,000 square feet.

The chairman of Mount Sinai’s board of directors, Joe Fennessy, said the board re-evaluated old plans for the facility, updating the infrastructure to match the evolving trends in health care. “We began to re-imagine what this hospital should be, and we realized to best serve the needs of our community, we had to be something different,” Fennessy said. “And that’s an entity that really focuses on more advanced and tertiary type services.” The expansion wing will feature larger operating rooms that can fit the state-of-the-art equipment needed to perform advanced cardiac surgery.

The ground floor of the J-Wing will expand the emergency department by 12,000 square feet. Combined with the renovations currently being done on the existing department, the improved ED is designed to serve 80,000 patients a year, which will more than double the current 36,000.

One person who was excited to see the proposed expansion of the emergency department is Rockville Centre resident Larry Ferazani. In December 2019, the cardiac emergency team conducted life-saving surgery on Ferazani after tests in the emergency room revealed he had had a widow-maker heart attack. “If I was not in this emergency room with this team of incredible folks, I would not be here today,” Ferazani said.

“I do feel like an expecting father and you’re all my cousins and family here today,” said Andrew Triolo, the vice president of design, development and construction. He outlined plans for a three-story parking structure and a utility plant to provide heating, cooling and emergency power for the hospital. An $89 million Federal Emergency Management Agency-funded project, the utility building will also provide storm resiliency.

“The last 18 months have been very hard all around the world, and that makes days like today that much more special,” said Dr. Adhi Sharma, Mount Sinai’s chief medical officer, “because we should appreciate that tomorrow is not guaranteed.”

Sharma lauded the board and design team for their efforts to adjust plans for the structure to account for Covid-19 issues. “What we learned during Covid, we wanted to apply to the design,” he said. New features include redone air handling to keep the environment clean, focusing on single-care spaces to limit contact with other patients and a streamlined system of oxygen delivery.

The J-wing’s expanded intensive care unit will help in the oxygen transportation process and in critical care and specialized services. “It’s a core value that we find a way,” Dr. Ken Davis, chief executive officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, said. Nine new operating suites for the surgical field will also expand the hospital’s advances in surgical technologies and equipment.

“It’s amazing what the team has done,” Sharma said. “I think health care in general has shown our resilience, our ability to think on our feet and our ability to roll up our sleeves.”