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The Top Hospital in America
By Joe Bargmann
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"You see what I mean?" Dowling asks. "The awards are nice. But caring for the patients is what it's all about."
THE HISTORY OF NORTH SHORE HOSPITAL
The history of North Shore Hospital begins with a kid being hit by a car. The year was 1945, and Manhasset, though growing, was still a quiet enclave of cow pastures and horse farms. If you needed a doctor, you called a physician who made house calls, or you headed into New York City. In an emergency, you were in trouble: There was no hospital in the area.
Peter Udell was 16 when the car mowed him down in Great Neck, a nearby town. Bleeding profusely, he had to be driven many miles for treatment. The boy survived, but his father and other area residents saw the need for a hospital of their own. They began raising money. A donation of $100,000 from a local businessman, as well as a 93-year-old woman's gift of $1,000—one-third of her life's savings—got things rolling. At the height of the effort 2,000 volunteers went door to door seeking donations. In the fall of 1950, Perry Como served as marshal of the Penny Parade, during which local kids collected 250,000 pennies for the cause.
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Heartthrob
"This is a special place", says Stanley Katz, chief of cardiology. "I've worked in many hospitals, and there is a softness
here that I've never seen at the other places."
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Everybody got in on the act, not insignificantly the wealthiest family in the area. Earlier in the century, financier Payne Whitney and his wife, Helen Hay Whitney, had been generous supporters of New York Hospital. Now their children, publisher John Hay "Jock" Whitney and his sister, Joan Whitney Payson, donated 12 acres of the family's Manhasset estate for the new medical center. Broadcasting mogul Bill Paley and his wife, Babe—Jock Whitney's sister-in-law—also gave generously. On May 16, 1951, ground was broken for a 163-bed community hospital on the hillside site. Two years later, North Shore Hospital served its first patient.
Until the mid-1960s, the hospital grew only slightly. But then North Shore transformed itself. During the next 30 years, new wings were appended to the original brown brick building, and teaching facilities and laboratories were built. Medical school affiliations were forged, first with Cornell University and later with New York University. Ultimately the little hospital grew into a state-of-the-art facility with 731 beds.
The stewards of this tremendous growth were Dennis F. Buckley, who headed the hospital from 1964 to 1983, and Jack Gallagher, who joined North Shore as an administrative intern in 1963 and retired as executive director in 1995. (Dennis Dowling joined North Shore in 1974 and followed in Gallagher's footsteps, all the way to the top job.) A fireplug of a guy with clear blue eyes and a mischievous smile, Gallagher is credited with giving the institution its personality. His goal was to create a place where people actually enjoyed coming to work, a place where they felt they belonged.
At a hospital awards ceremony last fall, Gallagher received a photo album commemorating his years at North Shore. On a cool, sunny morning a few months ago, Gallagher sat in Dowling's office, paging through that book. "This woman, Mary Chisolm, is still here," Gallagher said, stabbing a forefinger at a picture of a woman in kitchen garb. "Forty-five years, can you imagine! And her three boys worked here, too!"
In fact, two of her sons, Calvin and Mark, still work there. Mary, who now heads up catering for hospital events, says her family's long association with the hospital wouldn't have happened without Gallagher. "He would come in the cafeteria every Wednesday and have lunch with us," she recalls. "He'd ask, 'What's going on?' Everyone's opinion seemed to matter to him."
Born out of community spirit and nurtured like a family, North Shore continues to develop. Thanks to its prosperous and generous neighbors, the hospital is able to invest in the latest technology. Says Dowling, "Other hospitals may take a more conservative approach like, 'Let someone else test it, then we'll buy it.' Not us. We're interested in exploration and identification of technologies that are going to help patients in ways they've never been helped before."
For example, in 1984 North Shore became only the third hospital in the nation to install an MRI machine, now standard equipment in many hospitals. It is currently one of just a handful of hospitals with a PET scanner, which provides digital cross-sectional images of the brain. The hospital recently invested $1 million in an effort to become one of the first hospitals in the nation to institute robotic heart surgery. Now undergoing clinical trials, the device allows surgeons to perform operations without being in the same room as the patient.
In fact, cardiac surgery may be the specialty that best exemplifies North Shore's commitment to innovation. The cardiology department is headed up by 55-year-old Stanley Katz. Born and raised in South Africa, Katz trained in cardiology at New York's Montefiore Medical Center and joined North Shore in 1991. By 1994, the implantation of stents—tiny stainless steel wire-mesh tubes that prop open arteries to help restore blood flow—was becoming common, but only in non-emergency procedures. Katz pioneered their use during heart attack. Says Katz, "Now we're saving 99.03 percent of all the people who come in here with heart attacks."
Among them is Max Lilling, who was in tough shape when he was wheeled into the cardiac operation unit last November. At 63 and a physician himself, Lilling knew he was having a heart attack. He could feel his lungs filling up with fluid. "His condition was tenuous, borderline," recalls Katz. "His lungs were full of liquid. His blood pressure was low. He had a full house." In fact, two of the four major coronary arteries were severely blocked.
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