Light Shines on Mount Sinai South Nassau’s Emergency Nurses

Department earns Emergency Nurses Association’s prestigious Lantern Award; One of only 94 in the country to receive the honor

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.”

“This award is confirmation of what we already know: Mount Sinai South Nassau nurses work very hard to put the hospital’s patients first, from the moment they are admitted to the Emergency Department to the moment they are discharged,” said Stacey Conklin, RN, MSN, NI-BC, MHCDS, NE-BC, Chief Nursing Officer and Senior Vice President of Patient Care Services. “The nurses achieve this every day through teamwork and their natural passion to care for people.”

“Mount Sinai South Nassau’s Emergency Department has been transformed in recent years to better serve the hospital’s patients,” said Adhi Sharma, MD, 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.

As a result of teamwork, collaboration and enduring commitment to service excellence, Mount Sinai South Nassau’s Emergency Department was awarded the Emergency Nurses Association’s prestigious Lantern Award for reducing wait times and for demonstrating commitment to exceptional and innovative performance in leadership, practice, education, advocacy, and research.

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 Lantern Award also recognizes the effort of ongoing education and training of the nursing staff, providing the necessary skills and knowledge to adapt while fostering an environment of learning and progressive growth.

The Fennessy Family Emergency Department is in the final stage of a $60 million expansion and renovation that is expected to be completed in August. Upon completion, the Emergency Department will nearly double in size to 33,000 square feet with the capacity to see approximately 80,000 patients annually. Features of the new Emergency Department include centralized nursing stations for direct oversight of private patient rooms; bedside triage; a decontamination room; dedicated areas for pediatrics, geriatrics, and behavioral health emergency patients; and a state-of-the art Trauma Unit, which opened in January 2023.

The Emergency Department is the only Level II 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.

About Mount Sinai South Nassau
The Long Island flagship hospital of the Mount Sinai Health System, Mount Sinai South Nassau is designated a Magnet® hospital by the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) for outstanding nursing care. Mount Sinai South Nassau is one of the region’s largest hospitals, with 455 beds, more than 900 physicians and 3,500 employees. Located in Oceanside, New York, the hospital is an acute-care, not-for-profit teaching hospital that provides state-of-the-art care in cardiac, oncologic, orthopedic, bariatric, pain management, mental health, and emergency services and operates the only Trauma Center on the South Shore of Nassau County, along with Long Island’s only free-standing Emergency Department in Long Beach.

In addition to its extensive outpatient specialty centers, Mount Sinai South Nassau provides emergency and elective angioplasty, and offers Novalis Tx™ and Gamma Knife® radiosurgery technologies. Mount Sinai South Nassau operates the only Trauma Center on the South Shore of Nassau County verified by the American College of Surgeons as well as Long Island’s only free-standing, 9-1-1 receiving Emergency Department in Long Beach. Mount Sinai South Nassau also is a designated Stroke Center by the New York State Department of Health and Comprehensive Community Cancer Center by the American College of Surgeons; is an accredited center of the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Association and Quality Improvement Program; and an Infectious Diseases Society of America Antimicrobial Stewardship Center of Excellence.
For more information, go to www.mountsinai.org/southnassau.