Long Beach Residents Rate South Nassau's Long Beach ER Among Best in the Country

OCEANSIDE, N.Y. - May 27, 2016 - PRLog -- After nearly 10 months of operation, Long Beach residents overwhelmingly are reporting high satisfaction with the care they have received at South Nassau's Emergency Department in Long Beach and more than 87 percent of those treated at the facility did not have to leave the barrier island.

Patient satisfaction with the care and clinical staff at the Long Beach Emergency Department stands at among the highest recorded when compared to other emergency departments nationwide, according to HealthStream®, the nation's leading independent hospital and healthcare consultant.  HealthStream's ongoing Patient Insights® nationwide survey, which was conducted October-December 2015, shows that patient overall satisfaction rating as well as advocacy (which is the likelihood that a patient would recommend the Long Beach facility to family, friends and neighbors) rank in the 94th percentile nationwide.  HealthStream reports the patient satisfaction data directly to the federal government.

Patients gave high scores to bed-side care, communication, and compassion of the emergency department's staff, according to Healthstream.  Patients asked if the "staff is doing everything they could to help with pain" ranked the Long Beach facility in the 97^th percentile nationwide, while the amount of time that doctors spend with patients ranked in the 93^rd percentile, and the percent of patients who affirmed that doctors "care about the patient as a person" ranked in the 94^th percentile.

"The data shows that local residents are increasingly depending on South Nassau's Emergency Department, have accepted it as the 'go to' facility for emergency care on the barrier island and are having an overwhelmingly favorable experience," said Richard J. Murphy, president and CEO at South Nassau.  "We are encouraged by the success of the facility during its first 10 months of operation and, in fact, are seeing most of the patients that previously were handled by the Long Beach Medical Center's Emergency Department before it closed after Sandy."

More than 6,710 patients have utilized the emergency department in Long Beach for a wide range of medical emergencies, from lacerations to broken bones to strep throat and pneumonia to stroke and heart attack during its first nine months of service to Long Beach and barrier island residents.  Of those treated at the Long Beach Emergency Department, 87.8-percent have been treated and released home without having to leave the barrier island for hospital admission or advanced levels of medical treatment.  Some 85 percent of patients are arriving at the Long Beach facility on their own - either by car, on foot or by public transportation - with 15 percent coming by ambulance via the 9-1-1 system. Of the 6,710 patients treated in Long Beach, 8.7 percent were transferred and admitted to the hospital at Oceanside.

The Long Beach Emergency Department is Long Island's only free-standing Emergency Department licensed to operate by the New York State Department of Health. South Nassau opened the facility last summer as part of an ongoing effort to restore needed medical services to the barrier island following the closure of Long Beach Medical Center.

"We have created a new approach in Long Beach that is really allowing us to spend more time with patients," said Joshua Kugler, MD, chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine.  "We are becoming a model in Long Beach for how Emergency Medicine should be delivered."

The South Nassau Emergency Department at Long Beach is located at 325 E. Bay Drive, west of the former Long Beach Medical Center.  The facility is equipped with leading-edge emergency medical technology and features an experienced staff of board-certified emergency medicine physicians as well as registered nurses with advanced training in emergency medicine.

         The facility - which opened Aug. 10^th of last year - has six private treatment rooms, including an observation unit with three beds where patients can be held for up to 23 hours, a special room for infectious disease cases, a medical laboratory, a triage area, a behavioral treatment area and a decontamination room. It also features a trauma room and advanced medical imaging department that includes an X-ray machine and a 64-slice CT scanner, the only operational CT scanner of any type in Long Beach and on the barrier island. The 6,300-square-foot facility has the capability to surge to meet increases in volume if needed.

         Patients treated and stabilized at the Long Beach ED who require hospital admission or advanced levels of treatment are transferred by on-site ambulance service to South Nassau or the appropriate hospital. South Nassau, which services some 900,000 residents of the South Shore, from Queens to Suffolk County, is a Level II trauma center and advanced cardiac center.