Thousands of cardiac patients pass through St. Francis Hospital's doors each year and emerge with a new lease on life. So many that the institution calls itself "The Heart Center." Last year the hospital saw 2,331 patients for open heart operations and 12,296 patients underwent cardiac catheterizations; its success rate is such that U.S. News and World Report ranked St. Francis's cardiac program among the top 50 in the nation for 2003.

St. Francis Hospital (www.stfrancisheartcenter.com) is one of the beneficiary organizations receiving annual grants from the Manhasset Community Fund. Those Community Fund monies are important when you think of the hospital's annual outlay for charity care; in 2002 the sum was over $8.1 million. St. Francis makes a concerted effort to assure that its vital services are accessible to all, regardless of ability to pay, and works hard in the surrounding community to identify and provide for the needs of underserved men, women and children.

Our community's support of the hospital's charitable efforts will in turn help St. Francis Hospital assure that its services are available to all in need -- and that's where the work of Manhasset Community Fund (627-3850) comes in. The Manhasset Community Fund's grants have been directed to the hospital's DeMatteis Center's education programs " because those have been so broad in their reach to people in the community," says Suzanne Stallone, St. Francis Hospital's manager of corporations and foundations. "Anyone can attend them and benefit, there are so many different programs. We're helping the people who are making the contributions, too, in return. What the community gives here they're also benefiting from. There's a direct correlation."

"Many Manhasset residents have benefited from the tremendous scope of services offered at the DeMatteis Center," said Community Fund co-president Tom O'Malley. He added that "the Community Fund is proud to be one of their benefactors and we thank our donors for making that possible."

The DeMatteis Center for Cardiac Research and Education is located on Northern Blvd. in Old Brookville. "A big part of the mission of St. Francis Hospital is to serve the community's underserved," says Sue Palo, R.N., BSMA. Ms. Palo is the DeMatteis Center's director of cardiac fitness and education. "At the DeMatteis Center, which is an outpatient, ambulatory type of setting, we try very hard to meet the needs of the community through fitness programs, through community health and education and through rehabilitation. We have cardiac rehabilitation, pulmonary rehabilitation and physical therapy here, as well as the pain management center."

The majority of the patients coming to the Center tend to be from the local community, but Ms. Palo says, "We do see patients from all over Long Island because we are the Heart Center."

Staffed by cardiologists, registered nurses and exercise physiologists, the DeMatteis Center sees thousands of outpatients annually. Its popular Cardiac Fitness and Rehabilitation Program, which is dedicated to assisting men and women with a safe, effective cardiovascular exercise regimen, handles a whopping 64,000 visits annually. (That number includes the visits of patients who may return 100 times in a year.) "We have one of the largest hospital-based cardiac rehab programs in the country," says Ms. Palo. "Being part of a heart hospital helped it evolve that way." One popular program, the Cardio Circuit Class, attracted 2,833 participants last year. For detection, the DeMatteis Center has the latest technology including a cardiac MRI. "The pictures they get from that machine are just phenomenal in terms of assisting the doctor to make a good diagnosis and plan for treatment," says Ms. Palo. And non-invasive coronary artery scanning using Ultrafast CT (computed tomography) scanning is also available. This device, also known as EBCT, may also be used for early detection of lung cancer.

Ms. Palo oversees about 35 different programs for patients and their families at the Center. "In the Cardiac Rehab program at any point in time our census is 600," she says. The Center also sponsors many community lectures and programs like its popular June Health Fair, a one-day program which can attract up to 300 people. The hospital also participates in other communities' health fairs during the year.

The June Health Fair is free to the community. "We do cholesterol screening, high-density lipoprotein, blood pressure screening, and have a variety of mini-lectures or presentations," Ms. Palo says, "on topics such as healthy cooking with cooking demos and tastings; we have stress management, we have a smoking cessation specialist speak; and free pulmonary function tests. Last year our focus was health and fitness; we're seeing more and more of an older population so we were trying to gear a lot of our information particularly to seniors. The Nassau County Department of Senior Citizens Affairs was here, we've been getting much more involved with the American Heart Association. The Visiting Nurse Service was here; we did a heart healthy walk; we had a pharmacist here; people could ask questions, it was informative. We find that people look forward to it," Ms. Palo says of the Fair, "we get a lot of repeaters for that."

DeMatteis has a Women's Center on campus devoted to preventing breast cancer or detecting it early with state-of-the-art systems. Bone density scanning is provided here as well. Heart disease still seems to be perceived as a male problem. "We're still seeing more men than women in cardiac rehab," Ms. Palo says, "even though we've been really working on this women-and-heart-disease issue to make women more aware of their risks and need for rehabilitation."

The DeMatteis Center also works with the Arthritis Foundation and conducted a standing-room-only arthritis clinic at the Center last May. "We offered a number of mini-workshops and a keynote speaker and that was a very well attended community program," she says. "We are also a designated facility to do PACE [People with Arthritis Can Exercise] for people with arthritis. You tend to see more women than men with that diagnosis."

The Center also has a very popular CPR training program that's seen intense growth over the past two years. As a designated center for the American Heart Association, DeMatteis provides training in CPR, ACLS (advanced cardiac life support) and pediatric ACLS. All told, such training programs attracted 6,842 participants last year.

With all the programs and features the DeMatteis Center offers, Ms. Palo still sees challenges in getting the public to take advantage of health services. "To get people to make the actual time commitment to regular exercise and to actually maintain the diet is hard," she says.

"As part of St. Francis Hospital's commitment to prevention and health and well being, this fall we conducted a special seminar on women's health," Ms. Palo adds. Held on Thursday morning, Oct. 23, the seminar's topics included "Women and Heart Disease" and "Breast Health" and were delivered by top physicians in these fields.

St. Francis Hospital got its start in the 1920s as a summer camp for inner-city children run by Sisters of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary on a grant of Manhasset land known as Elderfields. In the '30s it became a sanatorium for children with heart disease. Further grants eventually transformed the operation into a full-blown heart hospital which opened its doors to adult patients in 1954. By the 1980s, St. Francis had added a full range of general medical services but had also made itself into New York State's leading heart center, performing the highest caseload of open-heart surgery and cardiac catheterizations.

The DeMatteis Center moved to its current 55-acre location in 1992. Nancy DeMatteis and her late husband, Fred, have been major benefactors to the hospital for almost 30 years. They played such a large role in instituting the Center that, Ms. Stallone says, "when it came time to dedicate the Center, it was named for them."

Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of articles about the organizations supported by the Manhasset Community Fund. These articles will appear periodically throughout the year to showcase some of the organizations doing great things in and around our community.