Nassau University Medical Center - History

History

Although NuHealth is a relatively new name in regional health care on Long Island, its roots go deep into Long Island's history. What began in 1935 as Meadowbrook Hospital — a 200-bed, general hospital in then-rural East Meadow, New York — has become part of a unique health organization serving the public, with multiple centers of care and a commitment to deliver excellent essential care to everyone, at every stage of life.

Following a series of epidemics in the early decades of the 20th century, concerned citizens petitioned Nassau County to build "a public general hospital for the care and treatment of the sick in the county of Nassau." In early 1931, Nassau purchased a 75-acre site in the geographic center of the county, at a cost of $95,625. Over the next four years, the original four-story main building with its twin solariums, as well as eight outbuildings, rose from the potato farms of the Hempstead Plains.

Designed to be the best equipped hospital in the county, it bore a hefty price tag in the day — the buildings themselves cost almost $1.6 million, and the equipment and furnishings added another $178,000. On July 15, 1935, Meadowbrook Hospital admitted its first patient.

At that time, Nassau's entire population just topped 300,000. During its first year of operation, Meadowbrook Hospital's staff of 330 treated fewer than 150 people a day as inpatients, seeing 560 patients in the emergency room and 813 in ambulatory patient clinics.

As the area developed, the hospital's proximity to the new and booming postwar community of Levittown ensured it an increasingly important role in Nassau County’s growth. The hospital expanded several times throughout the 40's and 50's, and celebrated its silver anniversary in 1960 with a two-story addition.

New sights were set to become a complete tertiary care, teaching medical center serving the needs of a population which reached one million that year. It would be ten additional years before Meadowbrook Hospital became Nassau County Medical Center.

Its crowning architectural achievement was marked in February 1974 with the opening of the 19-story, 1,000,000-square-foot Dynamic Care Building, a structure that has become a familiar Long Island landmark and remains Nassau's tallest building to this day.

In early 1997, Nassau County and New York State worked to create a new public benefit corporation that would provide a more comprehensive approach to the region's public health planning. Governed by an independent Board of Directors, the Nassau Health Care Corporation was charged with managing the operations of Nassau University Medical Center as well as the county-run A. Holly Patterson Extended Care facility, the infirmary at the County Jail, and the county's neighborhood health clinics.

Nassau Health Care Corporation made good on its promise and entered its second decade with a renewed purpose — and a new name, NuHealth— that honors both its past and its new vision for health care delivery in the region.

As NuHealth, this 1,200-bed health care system is moving toward a new model of care that emphasizes excellent essential hospital and ambulatory services and primary care in the community, upholding a shared responsibility for wellness and a continuum of care and integrated delivery of specialty services.