LeadingAge New York Adviser Winter Vol. 1 | Page 26

ST. MARY’S HEALTHCARE
SYSTEM FOR CHILDREN
Interview with President and CEO Dr. Edwin F. Simpser, MD and Assistant
Vice President/ Inpatient Administrator Vivian Figueroa, LNHA
The mission of St. Mary’s Healthcare System
for Children is to improve the health and quality
of life for children with special needs and
life-limiting conditions and their families. We
are New York’s largest and most experienced
provider of long-term care to children with
medically complex conditions and New York
City’s only free-standing post-acute care facility
for children.
Has your mission changed over time?
Our mission has definitely changed over time.
Historically, our mission has followed the
evolutionary landscape of care. If you look at St.
Mary’s 25-30 years ago, the in-patient skilled
nursing facility was pretty much a long term
care facility with most young people living there
for years. Some went home but the percentage
of those going home was relatively small. There
wasn’t a lot of turnover.
Over the last 10-15 years, we’ve restructured
our physical plant, our staffing model and
our capabilities to be able to care for much
sicker children largely to be more responsive
to hospitals that wanted to send us very sick
children needing shorter stays but that could
possibly go home, for example, kids with brain
injuries, respiratory problems or feeding needs.
It might be called sub-acute care if we were
going to give it a designation.
For a pediatric skilled nursing facility we have
considerable turnover. We have 97 beds for

which we have over 200 admissions and
discharges per year. Our average length of stay
for the children we discharge is somewhere
between three and five months. However,
the children occupying about half the beds
in the organization stay long term, with some
never going home. So when you look deeper
into the numbers, you realize that those 200
admissions and discharges really represent
only 50 beds turning over four to five times a
year. The discharge numbers really speak to the
success of this approach.
The other evolution is that 30 years ago we
were just a skilled nursing facility and now
we have this broad continuum of care with a
focus of moving children from the acute care
environment to home while using this wonderful
array of programs. Some programs that we offer
in addition to the skilled nursing facility to help
move children back to the community include:
• A licensed medical model adult day care
program with over 100 registrants for only
31 slots. While we are open seven days a
week some children come for two days, some
for four and some all seven. This is an ideal
transition tool to help move children out of
the facility and into living in the community.
• A special education preschool on campus
for medically fragile preschoolers. We
are able to handle children with complex
medical needs who otherwise could not
attend regular special education preschools
(continued on page 26)

25

Adviser a publication of LeadingAge New York | Winter 2015