Mount Sinai South Nassau opened five new operating suites this week on the second floor of its Feil Family Pavilion in Oceanside, rooms built twice the size of some of the ones they supplement. They are the first wave of a nine-room surgical complex that has been more than a decade in the planning, and the clearest sign yet that open-heart surgery is finally coming to Nassau County's South Shore.

Four more suites in the complex are scheduled to come online later this year. When all nine are running, the hospital that already performs more than 12,000 surgeries annually, from joint replacements to cancer operations to neurosurgery, will have the room to schedule more of them, sooner, without sending its most complex cases somewhere else.

Built double-sized on purpose

The new suites are twice the size of some of the operating rooms they supplement, and the extra square footage is not a luxury. Modern surgery increasingly means bigger teams working around bigger machines: robotic surgical assistants, three-dimensional image-guided navigation systems, and the carts, booms and monitors that follow them. The new rooms were drawn with open floor plans, high ceilings and upgraded lighting so all of it fits without the choreography older rooms require.

Two of the nine suites go a step further. They are hybrid operating rooms, which build the imaging equipment directly into the surgical suite: fluoroscopy C-arms, CT scanning and MRI capability alongside the surgical field. That lets a team image, diagnose and operate in one room without moving the patient between departments, an approach used most heavily in vascular surgery and increasingly in trauma, orthopedic and gynecologic procedures. Keeping the patient in one place shortens procedures, and research on hybrid rooms ties them to better outcomes.

The location inside the building was chosen just as deliberately. The surgical floor sits directly above the Fennessy Family Emergency Department and connects to it by a dedicated elevator, so an emergency patient who needs an operating room immediately is one ride away from it.

The two rooms that change the map

The detail with the longest reach is what two of the suites were built for. They were designed from the ground up for advanced cardiac surgery, including open-heart procedures, and the hospital expects the program to begin treating patients later this year.

That is a bigger deal than it may sound. South Shore cardiac patients who need open-heart surgery today travel to Manhattan or to the North Shore for it, often at exactly the moment when travel is hardest on a family. When the Oceanside program opens, it will be staffed and overseen by surgeons from the Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital in Manhattan, a cardiac program with national rankings to its name, and it will be the only program on Long Island run under that roof. The expertise, in other words, is commuting to the patient instead of the other way around.

Ten years of cranes, one campus

The operating suites are the latest piece of a roughly $500 million rebuilding of the Oceanside campus, the largest capital project in the hospital's history. The same initiative has delivered the four-story Feil Family Pavilion itself, a $50 million expansion and renovation of the emergency department, 40 critical care suites, a new power plant and a parking garage.

Mount Sinai South Nassau is the Long Island flagship of the Mount Sinai Health System, with 455 beds, more than 900 physicians and the only trauma center on Nassau's South Shore, plus Long Island's only freestanding 911-receiving emergency department, over in Long Beach. Hospital leadership describes the new floor as a setting that lets surgeons work at the top of their training while making patients safer and more comfortable, and the chair of surgery has pointed to the streamlined rooms and specialized equipment as capacity the hospital simply did not have before.

What it means if you live here

Hospitals expand quietly all the time, and most of it never touches an ordinary week. This one eventually will, for somebody you know. The practical translation of five bigger operating rooms is shorter waits for scheduled surgery and more procedures done locally that once required a referral off the Island or into the city. The practical translation of those two cardiac suites is starker: within the year, a Baldwin or Rockville Centre or Long Beach family facing a bypass may measure the trip in minutes on Merrick Road instead of an hour over the bridges.

The hospital has been pouring concrete on this campus for the better part of ten years, and most of that work has been invisible to anyone not walking its hallways. This week, the part patients will actually lie down in opened its doors.