Dr. Herbert Pardes, a psychiatrist and a former director of the Nationwide Institute of Psychological Well being who introduced order to the merger of two main medical facilities that turned New York-Presbyterian Hospital and ran it for 11 years, died on April 30 at his residence in Manhattan. He was 89.
His son Steve stated the trigger was aortic stenosis.
Dr. Pardes (pronounced par-diss) was named president and chief government of the hospital in late 1999, almost two years after the merger of New York Hospital and Presbyterian Hospital. The earlier decade, he had been the dean of the school of medication on the Columbia College School of Physicians and Surgeons, Presbyterian’s affiliated medical faculty.
“It was no secret that as dean of the medical faculty I didn’t at all times agree with the hospital administration,” he stated in his thick Bronx accent on CUNY TV in 2011. “I believed perhaps I might create a greater collaboration by going over to run the hospital.”
The merger created one of many largest well being care establishments within the nation, with 2,369 hospital beds, 13,000 staff and $1.6 billion in annual income. With 167 amenities, it unfold from Manhattan to Rockland and Orange Counties in New York. Its hospitals embrace the Weill Cornell Medical Middle in Manhattan.
“It was an amazingly completed merger contemplating the completely different cultures of the 2 establishments,” Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Larger New York Hospital Affiliation, a commerce group, stated in an interview. “He was the bridge that allowed the graceful and wrinkle-free transition of that establishment.”
However Alan Sager, a professor of well being regulation at Boston College, with out commenting on the New York-Presbyterian merger, stated in an e mail, “Proponents of mergers at all times say, in a self-sanctifying approach, that they’re combining to assist us, not themselves. But when mergers did lower prices (by no means substantiated), heftier hospital surpluses would end result — not decrease insurance coverage premiums.”
Dr. Pardes aspired to make New York-Presbyterian a mannequin for medical care, with intense deal with sufferers, environment friendly administration and inflexible monetary controls. He visited bedsides, insisted that nurses memorize sufferers’ and their households’ names, and ordered rooms and lobbies to be painted in soothing colours.
“I’ve by no means been in a position to stroll previous an issue,” he was quoted as saying in a profile about him in The New York Instances in 2007. “I’ve bought to repair it. This career is first about serving to sufferers survive — at all times has been. Sadly, I believe we will lose sight of that typically.”
Mr. Raske stated, “Herb met life’s issues with a childlike grin and a contact of borscht belt humor.”
Dr. Pardes was a prodigious fund-raiser for New York-Presbyterian, serving to to safe donations from the megawealthy to construct amenities just like the Morgan Stanley Kids’s Hospital, the Vivian and Seymour Milstein Household Coronary heart Middle, and the Iris Cantor Males’s and Girls’s Well being Facilities, all in Manhattan.
“He had a approach of socializing with high-powered individuals and speaking them into making large items,” Steve Pardes stated.
Herbert Pardes was born on July 7, 1934, within the Bronx and grew up primarily in Lakewood, N.J. His mother and father, Louis and Frances (Bergman) Pardes, owned the Lodge Greenwood in Lakewood, which was transformed right into a nursing residence within the late Nineteen Fifties, and managed resorts within the borscht belt of the Catskills.
At 7, Herbert was recognized with Perthes illness, a uncommon childhood sickness during which the blood provide to the ball a part of the hip joint is briefly interrupted, weakening the bone. Although he recovered with none lasting harm, he spent 10 months hospitalized in a full-body solid. Grim physicians caught needles in him with out rationalization, and hospital guidelines restricted his mother and father’ visits to only an hour a few instances every week, he recalled. The expertise traumatized him however, a long time later, helped inspire him to be extra attentive to sufferers.
As a youth he labored for his mother and father, observing how they pampered resort friends. He bought sodas for 10 cents, raised cash for the conflict effort, bell-hopped, waited tables and rose to maître d’hôtel.
“The eating room was a microcosm of eccentric conduct, a terrific conduct lab for somebody who would develop right into a psychiatrist,” Dr. Pardes advised The Instances in 2003.
He graduated from Rutgers College in 1956 with a bachelor’s diploma, then earned his medical diploma in 1960 from SUNY Downstate School of Medication (now SUNY Downstate Well being Sciences College) in Brooklyn. He served his medical internship and psychiatric residency at Kings County County Hospital in Brooklyn from 1960 to 1962.
After being drafted into the Military, Dr. Pardes ran the psychological hygiene clinic at Fort Myer in Arlington, Va., from 1962 to 1964. He was discharged and accomplished his residency in 1966, then graduated from the New York Psychoanalytic Institute in 1970.
For a lot of the subsequent twenty years he constructed his profession round psychological well being as chairman of the division of psychiatry at Downstate, chairman of the psychiatry division on the College of Colorado Medical Middle in Denver, and director of the N.I.M.H., the place he strengthened its analysis program.
In 1984, Dr. Pardes was appointed director of psychiatry service at Columbia College Irving Medical Middle and chairman of the psychiatry division on the School of Physicians and Surgeons. 5 years later, he was named the faculty’s vice chairman for well being sciences and dean of the school of medication, positioning him to run New York-Presbyterian Hospital after the merger.
Along with his son Steve, he’s survived by two different sons, James and Lawrence, six grandchildren and his accomplice, Dr. Nancy Wexler, a professor of neuropsychology on the School of Physicians and Surgeons who was the lead researcher for a examine of an prolonged household’s Huntington’s illness in Venezuela for twenty years. She herself has the illness. He had been separated from his spouse, Judith (Silber) Pardes, for the reason that Nineteen Eighties. She died in 2022.
Dr. Pardes was a well-paid nonprofit government, even after he stepped down as president and chief government in 2011. He was subsequently named government vice chairman of the hospital’s board of trustees, a place that compensation consultants stated was uncommon within the nonprofit world, in line with an article in The Instances in 2014.
In 2011, his closing yr operating the hospital, he earned $4.1 million (equal to about $5.8 million as we speak). Then, as government vice chairman, he obtained, $5.5 million, together with $2 million in deferred compensation in 2012. By way of 2022, he obtained at the least $2 million yearly.
Frank Bennack Jr., then the hospital’s board chairman, advised The Instances in an announcement in 2014 that Dr. Pardes had been retained for “pressing fund-raising actions and a spread of different institutional wants with which he might help his very good successor.”
Dr. Steven J. Corwin succeeded him and stays in that place.
Steve Pardes stated the deal with compensation irritated his father. “When he in contrast himself to C.E.O.’s in worthwhile companies, he might need been undercompensated,” Mr. Pardes stated. “However he wasn’t money-focused. He wished to be paid a good wage for what he contributed.”