Herbert Pardes, Who Steered the Development of a Large Hospital, Dies at 89

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 dwelling in Manhattan. He was 89.

His son Steve stated the trigger was aortic stenosis.

Dr. Pardes (pronounced par-diss) was named president and chief govt 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 college of medication on the Columbia College School of Physicians and Surgeons, Presbyterian’s affiliated medical college.

“It was no secret that as dean of the medical college I didn’t at all times agree with the hospital administration,” he stated in his thick Bronx accent on CUNY TV in 2011. “I assumed perhaps I may 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 workers and $1.6 billion in annual income. With 167 amenities, it unfold from Manhattan to Rockland and Orange Counties in New York. Its hospitals embody the Weill Cornell Medical Middle in Manhattan.

“It was an amazingly completed merger contemplating the totally different cultures of the 2 establishments,” Kenneth E. Raske, president of the Higher 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 legislation 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 outcome — 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 capable of stroll previous an issue,” he was quoted as saying in a profile about him in The New York Instances in 2007. “I’ve acquired to repair it. This career is first about serving to sufferers survive — at all times has been. Sadly, I believe we are able to lose sight of that generally.”

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 Youngsters’s Hospital, the Vivian and Seymour Milstein Household Coronary heart Middle, and the Iris Cantor Males’s and Ladies’s Well being Facilities, all in Manhattan.

“He had a approach of socializing with high-powered folks and speaking them into making enormous presents,” 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 dwelling within the late Fifties, and managed resorts within the borscht belt of the Catskills.

At 7, Herbert was recognized with Perthes illness, a uncommon childhood sickness through 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 clarification, and hospital guidelines restricted his mother and father’ visits to simply an hour a few instances per week, he recalled. The expertise traumatized him however, many years 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 warfare effort, bell-hopped, waited tables and rose to maître d’hôtel.

“The eating room was a microcosm of eccentric conduct, an excellent conduct lab for somebody who would develop right into a psychiatrist,” Dr. Pardes instructed 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 many 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 school’s vice chairman for well being sciences and dean of the college 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 research 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 govt, even after he stepped down as president and chief govt in 2011. He was subsequently named govt vice chairman of the hospital’s board of trustees, a place that compensation specialists stated was uncommon within the nonprofit world, in response to an article in The Instances in 2014.

In 2011, his last 12 months operating the hospital, he earned $4.1 million (equal to about $5.8 million right now). Then, as govt vice chairman, he acquired, $5.5 million, together with $2 million in deferred compensation in 2012. By 2022, he acquired a minimum of $2 million yearly.

Frank Bennack Jr., then the hospital’s board chairman, instructed The Instances in a press release in 2014 that Dr. Pardes had been retained for “pressing fund-raising actions and a spread of different institutional wants with which he may help his excellent 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 may need been undercompensated,” Mr. Pardes stated. “However he wasn’t money-focused. He wished to be paid a good wage for what he contributed.”