Northwell breaks ground on $10M women's surgical center

Northwell Health is building a $10 million women’s surgical facility at Glen Cove Hospital.

The 25,000-square-foot Katz Women’s Surgical Center, which is expected to open in late 2024, will provide a range of services for breast cancer and gynecological, urological and thyroid and parathyroid gland disease, as well as procedures for skin cancer. Its specialties will include robotic and minimally invasive surgery.

The center will be “a fully integrated destination,” Kerri Anne Scanlon, executive director of Glen Cove Hospital, said in a statement.

The center is intended to emphasize privacy and personal attention, according to Northwell, which held a groundbreaking ceremony last week. It will have its own entrance and parking area, and it will include up to 32 patient “bays” with glass partitions that can turn opaque for privacy, instead of curtains.

“We want to respect a woman's privacy, and acknowledge the sensitivity around this area, so that every aspect of the center has been designed with that in mind,” said Dr. Neil Tanna, vice president of the Katz Women’s Surgical Center at Glen Cove Hospital.

At the new facility, nurse "navigators" will escort patients through the center for their procedures and other appointments. The nurse navigators also can keep family members informed about how a surgical procedure is going and when it will be over, Tanna said.

The facility is named for Glen Cove residents Iris and Saul Katz, who made a “substantial and generous” donation to help fund the center, according to Northwell. The Katzes have lived in Glen Cove for more than 50 years, and Saul Katz is a member and past chairman of Northwell’s board of trustees and has served as a trustee at Glen Cove Hospital, Northwell said.  

The center was developed with Northwell’s 14-year-old Katz Institute for Women’s Health, also funded by the Katzes, whose goal is to help reduce health care disparities between women and men.

The new facility “is going to be the showcase for others to follow,” Iris Katz said in a statement. Women, she said, have been “understudied, undertreated and misdiagnosed. Women must be taken care of differently. Women deserve more.”

By Maura McDermott

maura.mcdermott@newsday.commauramcdermott

Maura McDermott is a reporter on the investigations desk. Since starting at Newsday in 2012, she has also covered real estate and the business of health care.