As replacement safety net hospital opens, CEO announces she's leaving

Just days before New Orleans welcomed a new state-of-the-art $1.1 billion safety net hospital to replace the hospital that post-Katrina flooding damaged beyond repair, the facility's CEO announced she was resigning.

Cindy Nuesslein, CEO of University Medical Center, announced that she would leave the hospital around the end of August to become a principal at Mazzetti, a San Francisco-based engineering and design firm with an office in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La. She oversaw UMC's transition from Interim Louisiana State University Hospital and its opening earlier in August, and will stay on through its initial Joint Commission review, which is expected to occur in the coming weeks.

“I've always been interested in the built environment as it can be a powerful and integral part of healing,” Nuesslein, an RN by background, said in a statement. “Looking through my clinical lens, it is analogous to the human body with its skeletal frame and thousands of miles of vessels including both the 'guts' of the building and the aesthetics.”

Greg Feirn, CEO of parent system LCMC Health, will become the hospital's interim CEO. The system has launched a national search for a replacement. “Cindy is leaving the new UMC in the best possible hands of the team she has helped create and is supremely confident in the continuing success of this amazing facility and the incredible caretakers that bring it to life,” he said in a statement.

UMC, a 446-bed, 2.3 million-square-foot-hospital, opened Aug. 1 with the transfer of 131 patients from Interim LSU Hospital, formerly known as University Hospital. It's the region's only Level I trauma center and is the major teaching facility for LSU Health Sciences Center and Tulane University.