St. Luke’s has announced several recognitions and programs:

School of nursing in Top 5

St. Luke’s School of Nursing ranks fifth out of 76 programs in Pennsylvania, according to the website RegisteredNursing.com. The rankings are based on the performance of the school’s graduates on the National Council Licensure Examination-Registered Nurse board exam.

St. Luke’s received the highest ranking of all the nursing programs in the Lehigh Valley.

“This ranking is a validation of how St. Luke’s School of Nursing carries out its mission of providing quality nursing education to a diverse group of students that enables them to become leaders in providing compassionate, high quality health care to those they serve,” said School Director Sandra Mesics, RN, MSN, CNM.

“For the past five years, we have exceeded the national average pass rate on boards,” Mesics said. “Our pass rate on this exam has ranged from 89 to 98 percent while the national average is 82 to 90 percent.” The SON’s pass rate for this ranking was 95.79 percent.

Cardiology award

Jamshid Shirani, MD, director of the general cardiology fellowship program at St. Luke’s University Health Network, has been selected to receive the prestigious Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education.

Shirani will be honored at ACGME’s annual meeting to be held in Orlando, Florida, in March 2018. He was selected from more than 250 nominations.

The Parker J. Palmer Courage to Teach Award is given to a program director who demonstrates ongoing innovation in medical education as well as successful programmatic outcomes.

Shirani was a finalist for the award in 2008. He also was awarded a certificate of recognition from the American Medical Group Association in 2008 for his work in reinventing the learning environment.

Shirani has been a program director for more than 20 years, joining St. Luke’s in 2008. He was recruited to help launch and direct the general cardiology fellowship program. An additional program in interventional cardiology was added in 2015.

Also, St. Luke’s cardiology fellow Srilakshmy Vallabhaneni, MD, will receive the David C. Leach award. The ACGME gives this award to honor residents, fellows, and resident/fellow teams and their contributions to graduate medical education.

New physicians

St. Luke’s Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery now employs two fellowship-trained physicians who perform the highly sought after Deep inferior epigastric artery perforator breast reconstruction.

An advanced microsurgical technique, DIEP breast reconstruction rebuilds the breast lost to mastectomy by using tissue taken from another part of the patient’s body, usually the abdomen.

Among its advantages, DIEP doesn’t require maintenance or repeat surgery, which often occurs with breast implants over time. Rather, when performing the DIEP procedure, our plastic surgeons rebuild the breast with soft, warm, living fat, as well as skin and vessels, obtained from the patient’s own abdomen. To ensure that the tissue will survive in its new location, our fellowship-trained surgeons use microsurgery to reattach the blood vessels in the tissue to blood vessels in the chest. The patient’s tissue is carefully reshaped into a breast mound and sutured into place. Unlike other breast reconstruction procedures that use the patient’s tissue, with DIEP no muscle is moved or repositioned.

St. Luke’s Plastic & Reconstructive Plastic Surgery physicians Lino Miele, MD, who joined the practice in 2015, and Juan Carlos Martinez, MD, who joined in September, are both trained in plastic and reconstructive surgery and are experienced in the DIEP procedure. Dr. Martinez received an additional year of training in microsurgery.