A Q&A with DR. MARK S. SILBERMAN - Chief of Emergency Services
The medical field is constantly evolving, and as it does, emergency rooms are able to provide a wider array of services with more cutting-edge equipment and more highly trained staff. We spoke recently with Dr. Mark S. Silberman, who runs the ER at the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion, about how he ensures that the quality of care remains high. Since 1989, Dr. Silberman has served as Chief of Emergency Services at both the Andrus Pavilion of St. John’s Riverside Hospital in Yonkers and the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion, a satellite of St. John’s, at 128 Ashford Ave. The Dobbs Ferry Pavilion treats 8,000 to 9,000 patients each year, and Dr. Silberman sees to it that a high level of care is ensured through the full scope of imaging equipment and doctors trained at the best hospitals in New York City.
Dr. Silberman himself is quadruple-board certified – in critical care and in emergency, internal and pulmonary medicine. Here, Dr. Silberman discusses the emergency services available at the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion.
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Q: Can you talk a bit about your history and the doctors at Dobbs Ferry?
I live in the local community–Dobbs Ferry. I was working at Columbia University Medical Center from 1987 through 2017. My primary job was teaching at the medical center, and my secondary focus was on the local community hospital. I had started there as a moonlighter when I was in my residency, and I just loved the community. I loved the fact that I could give personalized attention to every patient. I enjoyed it so much that I started bringing some of my highly trained colleagues from some of the best hospitals in New York City to join me as moonlighters in Dobbs Ferry.
A lot of the community isn’t aware of what they have because the hospital is small. We have doctors that have trained at Columbia, Cornell and NYU. . . . The level of attention and knowledge you have access to is pretty incredible for a small community hospital.
Q: How long is the wait time?
The average time to wait to see a doctor in Dobbs Ferry is 10 minutes.
Q: What changes have you made?
We started an emergency residency training program. We [also] have a lot of expertise in bedside ultrasound; we have expertise in stroke care. We have expertise in training the next generation of emergency physicians. We have a three-year program with 10 residents in each class, so we have 30 residents in training who rotate from Montefiore Medical Center [in the Bronx], St. John’s Riverside’s Andrus Pavilion in Yonkers and the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion.
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Q: What certifications do the doctors at Dobbs Ferry have?
All the doctors working in the Dobbs Ferry emergency room are board certified. We have 19 full-time physicians staffing the emergency rooms at the different St. John’s sites, including Dobbs Ferry, and all the full-time physicians are board certified in emergency medicine. Several of our physicians have multiple board certifications, including in critical care, family medicine and surgery.
Q: What is new in the emergency services department?
We are certified as a gold-plus hospital in stroke care which means that we meet criteria for rapid evaluation and rapid treatment of stroke patients utilizing TPA, the clot-busting medication, in a very rapid fashion. The residency is one of the new things we’ve developed. There is access to imaging of all modalities 24 hours a day at Dobbs Ferry as well as St. John’s, which is something important for the community to be aware of. Those types of services are not available in urgent care, so if you go into the urgent care with abdominal pain, they will not be able to do imaging for appendicitis with a CT scan, for example. We [also] have a tremendous amount of expertise in orthopedic care at Dobbs Ferry. We have a center of excellence for joint replacements and we also do orthopedic trauma.
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Q: How many physicians are on staff?
We have 20 physicians on our panel for both the Andrus and the Dobbs Ferry pavilions. So at any given moment, there would be 20 attending physicians and 30 residents in training. At the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion, there is a board-certified emergency physician (on duty) 24 hours a day. During the busier times of day, there will also be an emergency medicine resident in training.
Q: What are the most common ailments or injuries that you see?
We see a lot of infection complaints. Fever, cough. We see chest pain, abdominal pain, neurological complaints. We see a lot of trauma–broken arms, broken legs, broken hips. We see abscesses that need draining. Patients with kidney stones come to the emergency department quite frequently. Severe headache is another common complaint.
Q: Were there recently renovations as well?
We did some upgrading to our physical plant. There is new central monitoring equipment for cardiac monitoring and monitoring of vital signs and some new bedside point-of-care ultrasound machines.
Q: Were there any new services recently added?
We have an additional orthopedic group that we added recently [with] Dr. Howard Luks. Dr. [Stephen] Erosa is the new pain management physician. Juana Cuevas, MD, is our newest physician recruit for OB/GYN care. So we have quite a few new positions.
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Q: How has emergency care changed over the years?
Emergency medicine was a new specialty in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early days of my career, a lot of the doctors providing emergency care had not been specifically trained in that area. Nowadays, in the more urban and suburban areas, like our area, emergency care is provided by all board-certified emergency physicians who have specialty training to treat all those different types of problems that present in the emergency department.
Q: Are there specific types of care you can do now in the emergency room that you could not do in the past?
For strokes, we have wide utilization of TPA, which is new over the last decade or so. We’ve been refining those protocols more recently and expanding the criteria of who can benefit from that treatment. In cardiac care, we have advances in balloon angioplasty to open up blocked vessels in heart attacks to mitigate the damage and reverse the blockage.
Q: Is there anything else you want people to know about what they can expect when they come to the emergency room?
Although it’s a small hospital, the emergency room is full service. If someone comes into the emergency room, and they require specialty services that are not available in a small hospital, they can receive evaluation, treatment, imaging, medications, and then be transferred to a tertiary care center as needed. So the immediate care is right in the community, minutes away.
Q: What is the atmosphere at the Dobbs Ferry Pavilion?
It’s a very welcoming place. The staff is very attuned to the fact that emergency care is often delivered on what might be the worst day of someone’s life. We’re very much [focused on] rapidly making that human connection and reassuring people that they are in good hands.
Read articles from current and all previous issues of The Neighborhood Buzz: Rivertowns, plus receive a printed copy of the magazine every 3 months.
A local hospital, especially one with a full-service emergency room, is an invaluable asset that not every community can lay claim to. It offers residents the peace of mind that comes with knowing that the first phase of care for the full range of ailments and injuries is minutes away, whether they suffer an infection, a broken bone or life-threatening conditions such as stroke and heart attack, when every second counts. What’s more, in Dobbs Ferry, patients are treated by professionals who know the community and are dedicated to offering emotional support and reassurance along with medical care.
Read articles from current and all previous issues of The Neighborhood Buzz: Rivertowns, plus receive a printed copy of the magazine every 3 months.