The Mount Sinai hospital network in New York has changed the name of its cardiology services, which from now on will be called Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital (or Mount Sinai Fuster Heart Hospital, in its original English version). The name change is a tribute to Valentín Fuster, who has led Mount Sinai cardiology since 1994 and made it the fourth best in the world, according to this year's ranking by Newsweek and Statista.
“He is a model as a doctor, as a scientist and as a person; “We want our hospitals to maintain his vision,” Dennis Charney, dean of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, stated in a telephone interview. The new name will not entail any change in Fuster's duties at Mount Sinai, where he is medical director and president of the institute that encompasses all of cardiology. “He can continue as long as he wants; he is in top form,” Charney declares.
“We still have a lot to do to create a global culture of global health,” said Fuster. “At Mount Sinai I have dedicated myself to supporting young doctors and researchers to care for patients at the highest level and to respond to the great challenge of prevention.”
The name change for Mount Sinai's cardiology services, which since 2006 has been called Mount Sinai Heart and serves 100,000 patients a year, was announced at a tribute dinner for Fuster held Wednesday at the Pierre Hotel in New York.
The Barcelona cardiologist initially worked at Mount Sinai from 1982 to 1991. He spent three years in Boston as head of cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School. He returned to Mount Sinai in 1994, as director of the hospital's Cardiovascular Institute.
Under his direction, the different areas related to cardiology have been integrated into a single institute – “including nursing, which was not there when I arrived,” explains Fuster –; Innovative techniques have been introduced for the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases and therapies for their treatment; and public health programs have been promoted both locally in New York and globally.
The Newsweek and Statista ranking, which places Mount Sinai as the fourth best hospital in the world in cardiology, is prepared based on doctor evaluations, patient care results and hospital quality accreditations. The top three are the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester and Massachusetts General Hospital. The first Spanish center is the La Paz hospital in Madrid, number 16 in the world ranking in cardiology.
Fuster, who since 2005 has combined his work in New York with the general direction of the National Center for Cardiosvascular Research (CNIC) in Madrid, has also developed intense research activity. His scientific career began with research into the molecular causes of heart attacks. He continued with the introduction of therapies that were innovative at the time and are common today, such as low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks or the preventive polypill that the World Health Organization has included in its List of Essential Medicines. And over the past fifteen years he has addressed the socioeconomic and cultural causes of cardiovascular disease.
For these contributions, Fuster is the only person to have received the highest-ranking scientific awards from the world's four major cardiology organizations.
