After 39 years, hospital chairman says farewell
Sep 15, 2005
For decades, everyone who has received medical treatment at Staten Island University Hospital has felt the impact of Dr. Thomas G. McGinn.
A soft-spoken, small-framed man who has devoted countless hours to academic reading, Dr. McGinn is thought of as the borough’s most influential physician after almost 40 years of molding University Hospital’s staff. Today, Dr. McGinn’s colleagues, students and friends celebrate his legacy with a farewell fete.
At the end of the month, he will step down as the hospital’s first and only chairman of medicine, leaving the institution to reshape itself.
The physician’s departure comes as the hospital examines its rapid growth and begins
adapting to a new era—one in which it settles into its identity as a major institution
and collaborates more closely with North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health Care System.
Dr. McGinn was first hired by the struggling Staten Island Hospital in 1966. “When
we hired him, the hospital was on the verge of bankruptcy,” said Irving R. (Rick)
Boody Jr., who has served on University Hospital’s board of trustees for 51 years.
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About SUNY Downstate Medical Center
SUNY Downstate Medical Center, founded in 1860, was the first medical school in the United States to bring teaching out of the lecture hall and to the patient’s bedside. A center of innovation and excellence in research and clinical service delivery, SUNY Downstate Medical Center comprises a College of Medicine, College of Nursing, School of Health Professions, a School of Graduate Studies, School of Public Health, University Hospital of Brooklyn, and a multifaceted biotechnology initiative including the Downstate Biotechnology Incubator and BioBAT for early-stage and more mature companies, respectively.
SUNY Downstate ranks twelfth nationally in the number of alumni who are on the faculty of American medical schools. More physicians practicing in New York City have graduated from SUNY Downstate than from any other medical school.