Pharmacist at South Nassau Communities Hospital is Named a Healthcare Hero

Oceanside, NY, January 22, 2014 --(PR.com)-- The Long Island Business News (LIBN) recently awarded its “Health Care Heroes” Health Care Professional Hero Award to Carl Zipperlen, a pharmacist at South Nassau Communities Hospital. LIBN’s “Health Care Heroes” awards honor individuals and organizations in the health care industry in Nassau and Suffolk counties for outstanding leadership and commitment.

A clinical pharmacist, Zipperlen’s expertise in the field of pharmacy is essential to the delivery of high-quality, compassionate patient care. If he’s not consulting with the hospital’s clinicians, he’s counseling patients on proper medication use, answering their questions on how to take medicines safely and effectively and teaching them about possible side effects and drug interactions.

His contributions to the hospital practice of pharmacy have been recognized inside and out of South Nassau. In 2002 he was the recipient of the hospital’s Touching Lives Award for his numerous contributions and for providing excellent customer service. That same year, he was one of six New York State pharmacists honored by Drug Topics magazine as “Pharmacist of the Year” for championing a pharmacy influenza and pneumonia immunization program at South Nassau. In 2005, he won the One-to-One American Pharmacists Association’s Counseling Recognition Program for demonstrating outstanding “pharmacist-to-patient contact” that resulted in optimized medication regimes and improvement in patients’ physical and emotional well-being. In 2005 and 2011, he was saluted twice as South Nassau Employee of the Quarter and then honored as the Employee of the Year in 2011.

A resident of East Rockaway, NY, Mr. Zipperlen is a St. John’s University College of Pharmacy preceptor. He prides himself in creating an atmosphere in which students are offered numerous learning opportunities. He has often said that it’s important to raise the community’s awareness of the true value of pharmacists to the health care team. To that end, he provides lectures to schools and libraries in the community and at health fairs on such topics as the treatment of diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, and attends career days at several local high schools to speak about the rewards of a career in pharmacy.

South Nassau® Communities Hospital is one of the region’s largest hospitals, with 435 beds, more than 900 physicians and 3,000 employees. Located in Oceanside, NY, the hospital is an acute-care, not-for-profit teaching hospital that provides state-of-the-art care in cardiac, oncologic, orthopedic, bariatric, pain management, mental health and emergency services. In addition to its extensive outpatient specialty centers, South Nassau provides emergency and elective angioplasty and is the only hospital on Long Island with the Novalis Tx™ and Gamma Knife® radiosurgery technologies. South Nassau is a designated Stroke Center by the New York State Department of Health and Comprehensive Community Cancer Center by the American College of Surgeons and is an accredited center of the Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery Association and Quality Improvement Program.