Surgical Services
St. Joseph's offers comprehensive surgical care for ambulatory, elective and critically ill patients. Surgical services is comprised of pre-admission testing, the operating room, post anesthesia care unit, ambulatory surgery centers, and the endoscopy unit.
Your surgical visit may include an appointment with our pre-admission testing department. This department is dedicated to meeting the concerns of our pre-operative patients and their families. A visit to pre-admission testing gives each patient having surgery at St. Joseph's the opportunity to incorporate all testing, health history reviews and teaching into one visit.
The operation room performs more than 11,000 cases a year. St. Joseph's is a center of excellence for open heart surgery. Our cardiac program has consistently ranked as one of the top programs in New York State. Our cardiac surgeons perform more than 800 open heart procedures, including 450 coronary artery bypass grafts and 350 valve replacements per year.
When our patients need orthopedic and spine services, they can trust St. Joseph's Orthopedic Care Center. Recipient of HealthGrades' America’s 100 BEST for Joint Replacement in 2012, our goal is simple: to return patients to normal function as quickly and safely as possible. In fact, our professionals treat more musculoskeletal patients each year than any other provider in the Central New York region.
Named the No. 1 hospital for vascular surgery in New York State (NYS) and among the top five percent in the nation by HealthGrades®, St. Joseph's vascular program is one of the largest vascular diagnostic and treatment programs in NYS. Our specially trained physicians are skilled in the latest surgical techniques, including a new minimally invasive treatment for varicose veins.
Other specialties offered at St. Joseph's operating rooms include aesthetic surgery, general surgery, laparoscopic, genitourinary, gynecologic, urologic, colorectal, thoracic, oncology, neurosurgery, bariatric surgery and robotics surgery.
On the day of your surgery at the hospital, the immediate preparation for your surgery will occur on one of our access units. The staff members are specially trained to assess and prepare you for your procedure, while taking every measure to help ease the anxiety of family members while waiting for their loved ones. After your procedure, if you are to return home the same day, you may return to the access units for observation, review of discharge instructions and to ensure the proper supportive services are in place prior to discharge.
Ambulatory surgery is performed at our two ambulatory surgery centers, Northeast Surgery Center and North Surgery Center. These centers offer the quality of a hospital with the accessibility of a doctor's office. Routine surgical and endoscopic procedures are done quickly and conveniently. The North Surgery Center specializes in a progressive pain management program. The Northeast Surgery Center provides a very popular aesthetics surgery program.
The endoscopy suite performs more than 6,000 procedures a year. This unit combines the technological aspects of the operating room with the patient contact of the access units. Procedures performed include, but are not limited to, colonoscopy, endoscopy, bronchoscopy, endoscopic retrograde cholangiogram pancreatogram and other diagnostic procedures.
St. Joseph’s is continually focused on patient safety and the highest quality of care. In 2011, it implemented an aviation-based patient safety training program through LifeWings Partners LLC, a leader in aviation safety tools. St. Joseph’s is training all its operating room staff using LifeWings’ Crew Resource Management (CRM) program. Built by a former Top Gun instructor and a group of commercial airline pilots, former astronauts, physicians, nurses and risk managers, the training program has been proven to significantly and measurably reduce errors, increase patient and employee satisfaction, reduce turnover, and cut healthcare costs.