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Pat Tursi
CEO, Elizabeth Seton Children’s
Established by the Sisters of Charity in 1988, Elizabeth Seton Children’s delivers specialized services to children with mul-tiple physical and neurological conditions and disabilities.
Pat Tursi, a lay associate Sister of Charity, joined the center in 2001 and has overseen its move from Manhattan to a state-of-the-art facility in Yonkers and its expansion to 169 beds, making it the largest provider of pediatric post-acute care in the U.S.As a Catholic, I was very excited 18 years ago about coming to Elizabeth Seton Children’s. I had worked in not-for-profits my whole career, and I had worked in health care, but never in a Catholic facility. One of the board members, Sister Carol Barnes, SC, was my mentor and really helped me to understand the sisters’ charism of humility, simplicity and charity, and revealing God’s love in the work they do, especially for the poor. And that’s who we care for: 99.9% of our families are on Medicaid.
Our kids are very medically complex. In many cases they can’t speak, they need feeding tubes to eat and they can’t walk, so they rely on staff to be their eyes, their ears, their hands. And our staff gets to know very small nuances of the children.
We are not a sad place at all; we are a happy place – but you do deal with all of life’s challenges. We have kids from the time they’re two weeks old up until they are 21 years old. Sometimes our kids are able to go home, and sometimes they stay here their whole life. So it is all the phases of life.
I don’t think anybody else does the work like we do it. And I think that is because of the Sisters of Charity. The philos-ophy and the mission, and everyone feeling the mission every day, are what sets us apart. The sisters are the foundation and rock for us.
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“Elizabeth Seton was a widow and a single mom, dealing with a lot of discrimination. She really understood the mother’s grief and the mother’s sorrow.” – Pat Tursi