The Work We Do: Daniel Mazzone, Acadia Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation

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My name is Daniel Mazzone and I am the director of nursing at the Acadia Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, formerly known as the Riverhead Care Center. 

This is a skilled nursing facility, 181-bed facility that specializes in long-term and subacute care.

I’ve worked here for about 10 years, working my way up through the ranks to my current role as the director of nursing for the past 11 months. If there’s one word I could use to describe Acadia throughout my tenure, that word would be “family.” Here at Acadia, we are one big family. Through dedication, hard work and compassion, we care for your family as if they were our own.

My role as the director of nursing is kind of to conduct the orchestra. Not only do I provide education and kind of make sure, on a day-to-day basis everybody is functioning and executing the way they should be, following our policies and procedures — but also, it’s to motivate, making sure our staff is always around with a smile, providing the highest quality care to our residents and providing them the tools necessary to do so. I’ve worked my whole career here … and I started as an LPN, where I was on the floors, passing out medication, doing treatments. I was in school, I was working here, became an RN, then helped run the subacute rehab, then became the associate director and learned under my mentor who was our previous director of nursing.

With some key changes in our upper-management team, we have been able to keep up with the ever-evolving health care field. As a management team, we came together and we brainstormed — took a look at all the residents coming into our facility and we looked at the highest incidences and what diagnoses were coming out most. We had very high incidences of chronic lung diseases, and with that, we set out to develop a pulmonary rehabilitation program … that focuses on monitoring oxygen saturation and recovery time during rehabilitation and also promoting healthy lung function.

It’s almost like I didn’t forget where I came from so I know what it’s like to be on the floor, what you need to be on the floor working with these residents hands-on, frontline staff. So, I do my best to try to provide that to everybody every single day.

“The Work We Do” is a News-Review multimedia project profiling workers around Riverhead Town.