Burke Rehabilitation Hospital announced the reopening of its renovated and retrofitted Outpatient Therapy Facility located on its 61-acre main campus in White Plains. The state-of-the-art facility offers more than 10,000-square feet of dedicated space for physical, occupational, speech and language, and specialty therapies. The transformation allows for an open flow throughout the building with the removal of an 18-inch thick brick structural wall dating back to 1915.
The first floor is dedicated exclusively to physical therapy. It features high-tech equipment that improves the functionality of muscles and challenges cognitive abilities.
The facility also duplicates advanced technology used in Burke’s inpatient neurorehabilitation gym to allow outpatient therapists to safely work with patients on their individualized therapy plans. Patients push their limits earlier in the treatment program for optimal results with equipment such as the Bioness Vector Overhead Intuitive Body Weight Supported System, Electric Parallel Bars, Motomed Viva 2 and Functional Electrical Stimulation Bikes.
The second floor is devoted to speech and language and occupational therapies, providing patients with access to innovative therapy technologies. This area features the Jacob Salzman and Dr. Herbert S. and Eva M. Lewin Activities of Daily Living Space donated by Burke benefactor Michelle Goldman. The space resembles a studio apartment equipped with a complete kitchen with a working refrigerator, sink and microwave and, for safety reasons, a nonworking stove, oven and dishwasher. It also includes a simulated bathroom with a tub, toilet and shower.
Montefiore Nyack Hospital dedicated its new state-of-the-art Cardiac Catheterization Lab, part of the hospital’s new Interventional Cardiology Program. Led by a team of cardiovascular experts, the Catheterization Lab allow heart conditions to be diagnosed and treated using minimally invasive, nonsurgical procedures including cardiac catheterization and interventional cardiology.
“Time is heart muscle, and every minute that passes can cause irreversible heart damage, permanent injury or cardiac arrest,” says William Greenhut , DO, Medical Director Emergency Medicine at Montefiore Nyack Hospital. “With the cardiac cath lab in close proximity to the Emergency Department, we can transport patients there in minutes for emergency procedures.”
Montefiore Nyack Hospital has received the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association’s Get With The Guidelines-Stroke Gold Plus Quality Achievement Award. This award recognizes the hospital’s commitment to ensuring stroke patients receive the most appropriate treatment according to nationally recognized, research-based guidelines based on the latest scientific evidence.
Montefiore Nyack Hospital earned the Get With The Guidelines Gold Plus Achievement Award with Honor Roll Elite by reaching an aggressive goal of treating patients with 85% or higher compliance to core standard levels of care as outlined by the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association for two consecutive calendar years. In addition, the hospital demonstrated 75% compliance to four out of seven stroke quality measures during a 12-month period.
According to the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association, stroke is the No. 5 cause of death and a leading cause of adult disability in the United States. On average, someone in the U.S. suffers a stroke every 40 seconds and nearly 795,000 people suffer a new or recurrent stroke each year.
White Plains Hospital opened the doors to its most significant campus addition to date: the new Center for Advanced Medicine & Surgery (CAMS) — a 252,000-square-foot, nine-story outpatient center located at 122 Maple Avenue, at the corner of Maple and Longview avenues in White Plains. This facility features state-of-the-art operating rooms; endoscopy, ambulatory and procedure suites; wound care delivered through hyperbaric chambers; advanced imaging; noninvasive diagnostic testing and specialty physician offices.
CAMS is the largest dedicated outpatient facility for White Plains Hospital and one of the largest in Westchester County. Connecting to both the main Hospital and Center for Cancer Care, CAMS is the latest addition to the hospital’s ongoing campus transformation, which included a new Center for Cancer Care, completed in 2016, and the Hospital’s new lobby, inpatient tower, and operating room renovation, completed in 2015. Since 2015, approximately 622,000 square feet have been renovated or added to the hospital and its off-site locations.
Nuvance Health’s Vassar Brothers Medical Center, Norwalk Hospital, Danbury Hospital and its New Milford campus have received American Heart Association Quality Achievement Awards for implementing specific quality improvement measures to treat patients who suffer severe heart attacks and for their commitment to managing heart failure patients.
Both Danbury Hospital and Vassar Brothers Medical Center earned the 2021 Mission: Lifeline Gold Plus STEMI Receiving Center Achievement Award and Norwalk Hospital the 2021 Mission: Lifeline Gold STEMI Receiving Center Achievement Award.
Vassar Brothers Medical Center, Danbury Hospital and Norwalk Hospital earned the awards by meeting specific criteria and standards of performance for quick and appropriate treatment through emergency procedures to re-establish blood flow to blocked arteries in heart attack patients coming into the hospital directly or by transfer from another facility.
Danbury Hospital and its New Milford campus also received American Heart Association/American Stroke Association Get With The Guidelines awards. Danbury Hospital earned the Heart Failure Gold Plus with Honor Roll and New Milford received the Heart Failure Silver Plus with Honor Roll. Both facilities also received the Target: Type 2 Diabetes Honor Roll.
The Medical Society of the State of New York and the American Medical Association released new recommendations as part of the AMA Substance Use and Pain Care Task Force to help end the nation’s drug-related overdose and death epidemic.
The recommendations are focused on actions physicians can take as well as those policymakers and public health officials must take. This includes broad efforts to remove barriers and improve access to evidence-based care for patients with pain, substance use disorders (SUD) or mental illness, as well as increase access to multiple harm reduction strategies. The new task force also will work to more directly address the changing drug overdose epidemic, focus on removing racial, gender, sexual orientation and other health-related inequities.
Highlights of the recommendations include:
- Support patients with pain, mental illness or a SUD by building an evidence-based, sustainable and resilient infrastructure and healthcare workforce. This approach is an alternative to continuing a crisis-driven approach that has led to multiple unintended negative consequences, including one-size-fits-all strategies, continued stigma, and widespread gaps in data, evidence-based treatment and prevention efforts.
- Support coverage for, access to and payment of comprehensive, multidisciplinary, multi-modal evidence-based treatment for patients with pain, a substance use disorder or mental illness. Additionally, coverage, access and payment should directly address racial, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic and economic inequities as well as social determinants of health. This includes removing barriers to evidence-based treatment for SUDs, co-occurring mental illness and pain.
- Broaden public health and harm reduction strategies to save lives from overdose, limit the spread of infectious disease, eliminate stigma and reduce harms for people who use drugs and other substances.
- Improve stakeholder and multi-sector collaboration in an effort to ensure that the patients, policymakers, employers and communities benefit from evidence-based decisions.
White Plains Hospital recently added hyperbaric medical therapy to its services. Central to the hospital’s new Limb Preservation Program is hyperbaric medicine, delivered through two-state-of-the-art hyperbaric oxygen chambers. In hyperbaric therapy, patients recline in enclosed beds while they breathe 100% pressurized oxygen over a series of sessions (the air we breathe normally is 21% oxygen). The high concentration of oxygen is the most advanced therapy to cure infections that are resistant to antibiotics while also boosting healthy tissue growth.
Hyperbaric therapy is especially beneficial to those with diabetes and who suffer from difficult-to-heal infections of the feet, sometimes referred to as “diabetic foot.” It has been estimated that 1 out of 3 people with diabetes 50 years of age or older are at risk of losing a limb.
The Carl Weber Wound Care Center was named for Carl Weber, MD, former President of the Medical Staff and Director of Surgery. Dr. Weber was a beloved champion for all patients — especially those whose quality of life was dramatically impacted by chronic wounds. The program now continues under the direction of Joseph Cavorsi, MD, and its expansion to include hyperbaric medicine is a powerful addition.
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Source: MD News August/September 2021, Lower Hudson/Bronx Edition