NYU Receives Magnet Award: Medical Center Nurses Hailed for Outstanding Patient Care

When Susan Bowar-Ferres, Ph.D., R.N., Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, appears on the floors of Tisch Hospital or the Rusk Institute, it’s a sure bet that staff nurses take notice. But on a recent Tuesday morning, they noticed a particularly broad smile on her face and a small lapel pin on her violet suit. The pin bore the word Magnet, which explained to everyone present why she was beaming.

Some of the 1,400 staff nurses at NYU Medical Center cheer the news delivered by Susan Bowar-Ferres, Ph.D., R.N., Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer (shown in violet suit), that NYU has received the Magnet Award for excellence in nursing. Magnet facilities have positive outcomes for nurses and patients alike: lower mortality rates, shorter lengths of stay, increased patient satisfaction, and increased retention and recruitment rates among nurses.

“I’m here to announce,” she said cheerily several times to groups of nurses who gathered
at the nursing stations she visited, “that we are Magnet nurses at a Magnet hospital.” With this long-awaited news, the nurses realized that
NYU Medical Center had just been admitted
to a highly select group of hospitals and medical centers honored for their excellence in nursing.

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She Floats Like a Butterfly, Too

Khaliah Ali, daughter of boxing legend Muhammad Ali, says her bout with obesity began in childhood. But the successful plus-size model and fashion designer was determined not to be a heavyweight.

In August 2004 she underwent bariatric surgery at NYU Medical Center, having a silicon, ring-shaped device called a lap-band installed around the top portion of her stomach. As shown here six months later, she’s well on her way to championship condition.

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The Heart's Surgeons

On a recent Friday morning in an operating room on the fifth floor of Tisch Hospital, a group of cardiac surgeons huddled around a 79-year-old man whose heart was in need of mitral valve repair. The right side of his chest already bore a four-inch-long incision, the portal for the life-saving surgery that was about to begin. On overhead video monitors, his heart was clearly visible to everyone in the room. Then all eyes turned to chief surgeon Aubrey C. Galloway Jr., M.D., who was using special elongated instruments to make an incredibly delicate cut in the heart’s left atrium.

Surgeons in the newly created Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery perform more than 1,800 operations annually. Many take place in the ORs on the fifth floor of Tisch Hospital. One such operation is pictured above.

To the onlookers in the room—some of the more than 200 surgeons who have come from around the globe to learn this procedure—that was the moment they had been waiting for. But to Dr. Galloway, it was all in a day’s work. He and his colleague, Stephen B. Colvin, M.D., the first Chairman of the newly created Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery, have performed thousands of such mitral valve repairs, often working in adjoining ORs. Using a device they developed, they inserted into the heart’s mitral valve a kind of internal scaffolding that enables the valve to maintain its shape and to keep it working efficiently.

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