Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing

The school occupies a facility of more than 35,000 square feet at 148 East 126th Street, between Lexington and Third Avenues in East Harlem.[1][3] Its two-floor campus includes a clinical simulation learning center representing inpatient, primary-care, home-care, and operating-room settings, high-fidelity manikins, an auditorium, classrooms, a study center, and an Information Commons.[1] Model hospital inpatient rooms and operating rooms allow students to practice complex clinical procedures before entering live hospital environments.[3]

The school is part of the Mount Sinai Health System and provides students with training and clinical rotations across the system's hospitals.[3] At the time of the 2022 campus announcement, the majority of graduates went on to work as full-time nurses within the system.[3] Its curricula were designed for working adults entering nursing, registered nurses advancing their careers, and foreign-educated physicians and nurses seeking to pursue nursing practice in the United States.[3] Mount Sinai reported enrollment of more than 400 students in August 2026, compared with close to 350 in its 2022 announcement.[4][3]

The reviewed sources document two distinct nursing-school histories associated with Beth Israel Hospital and Mount Sinai Hospital, both of which were rooted in New York's Jewish immigrant community. They do not, however, establish a continuous institutional chain connecting the nineteenth-century Mount Sinai program to the present Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing.[1][2]

Beth Israel Hospital was founded in December 1889 specifically to meet the healthcare needs of a new wave of Jewish immigrants.[1] By February 1890, the Beth Israel Hospital Association had 249 members and $4,586—enough to establish a makeshift dispensary in a Lower East Side loft.[1] Several months later it opened an outpatient dispensary in a rented building on Henry Street, staffed by twelve volunteer doctors; in 1891 it expanded to a 20-bed inpatient unit where Jewish religious and dietary laws were observed.[1] The student handbook records that the Beth Israel School of Nursing enrolled its first class in 1902, when Beth Israel was operating as a 115-bed inpatient facility at Jefferson and Cherry Streets.[1] Early students, who ranged in age from 18 to 35, needed only to be able to read and write for admission; many came from foreign-born communities, allowing patients to describe their symptoms in their own language.[1]

Mount Sinai Hospital maintained a separate nursing program. Advocacy for a nurses' training school at Mount Sinai began in 1878, led by Auxiliary member Mrs. Alma de Leon Hendricks.[2] By 1880, the Medical Board and a joint committee of Hospital directors and Auxiliary members had advanced the proposal; that committee recommended a school "connected with the Hospital, but in its workings free and independent."[2] The Mount Sinai Training School for Nurses was incorporated in February 1881 as a separate but cooperative institution and opened in March of that year.[2][5] Minnie Dessau Louis served as executive committee secretary of the school from 1882 to 1886, then as its president from 1886 to 1889.[6] By 1904, Mount Sinai Hospital, its dispensary, and its training school together occupied an entire city block between 100th and 101st Streets and Fifth and Madison Avenues.[7]

The Mount Sinai Training School for Nurses initially offered a two-year course modeled on Bellevue Hospital's nursing program.[2] Practical work was at first restricted to female and children's wards, though students later gained additional clinical experience through arrangements with the Ladies Lying-In Relief Society, the Nursery and Child's Hospital, and the New York Infant Asylum.[2] Instruction covered bedside care, bandaging, emergencies, anatomy and physiology, observation and reporting of patients' condition, and the preparation of food for the sick.[2]

The Mount Sinai school was designed to be nonsectarian while actively encouraging Jewish women to apply.[2] In its first year, 30 applications from Jewish women were received and 17 were accepted into a first class of 43; four of the original eight probationers were Jewish.[2] Rose Kaplan, one of the school's notable early graduates, went on to serve as a nurse in the Spanish-American War, and in 1913 was hired by Hadassah to help establish its district visiting-nursing program in Palestine.[8]

The Mount Sinai Hospital Training School for Nurses was renamed the Mount Sinai Hospital School of Nursing in 1923.[2] In 1927, its training period was extended from two to three years, and a new fourteen-story School of Nursing building opened. The building was connected to the Hospital by an underground passage and contained an auditorium, library, and student living quarters with capacity for 476 residents.[2][5]

Among the most dramatic episodes in the Mount Sinai program's early decades was its experience during the 1918 influenza epidemic. Eighty-five nurses contracted influenza, 18 developed pneumonia, and three pupil nurses died within a single week; two graduate nurses also later died.[2] When the Superintendent suggested that the September 1918 entering class disband and return home, all 58 members voted to stay and continue caring for patients.[2]

The Mount Sinai Hospital School of Nursing's 1955 annual report identified it as one of the country's pioneer nurse-training establishments. It recorded 99 new students entering that year—27 in February and 72 in September, thirteen more than had entered in 1954—bringing total enrollment to 204 students.[5] Sixty-six students graduated on February 7, and the State Education Department re-registered the program in full, effective May 6, 1955.[5]

The curriculum by that period spanned science, nursing arts, medical and surgical nursing, pediatrics, maternity nursing, operating-room nursing, public-health nursing, physical education, and nutrition and diet therapy.[5] Clinical courses for graduate nurses were also offered, and students assigned to pediatrics could elect to gain experience at the Jack Martin Respirator Center; up to one-third of those assigned could choose that option.[5] Beginning with the class entering in 1955, student vacation during the course increased from 10 to 12 weeks, and sick time became accumulative rather than being capped at seven days per year.[5] Student life included dances, sports, a Glee Club, musicals, and a yearly "Sing Night" competition.[5]

The present school's handbook states that it received approval in 1978 to grant an Associate in Applied Science degree with a major in Nursing.[1] An RN-to-BSN program for registered nurses holding associate-degree or diploma credentials was introduced in 2014.[1] In 2017, the school launched a 15-month accelerated pre-licensure baccalaureate program for individuals who already held a bachelor's degree in another discipline. The handbook designates the second-degree program as the SDBSN and describes both a four-semester accelerated option and a 27-month, seven-semester part-time pathway.[1]

The RN-to-BSN program received accreditation from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education for five years through December 31, 2021.[9] The program was designed to address interest in advanced specialty areas such as critical care, emergency care, and perioperative nursing.[9] In 2018, the National League for Nursing named the school a Center of Excellence in Nursing Education for 2018–2022—its second consecutive such designation—in the category of enhancing student learning and professional development.[10] It was one of 12 institutions selected nationally in that category and was identified as the only hospital-based nursing school in New York City at the time.[10]

In January 2022, the school announced the Upward Mobility Program, a 15-month pathway for associate-degree nurses to earn a BSN with tuition fully covered through a two-year service commitment to the Mount Sinai Health System.[11] Participants work and train in cohorts at the system's eight hospitals, spending 80 percent of their time practicing as registered nurses and 20 percent in independent study; optional specialty tracks include perioperative, labor and delivery, emergency, and critical care nursing.[11]

On August 31, 2026, the school announced that it had earned institutional accreditation from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, after receiving candidate status in March 2023.[4] The review included a campuswide self-study and a peer evaluation visit in March 2026, examining the school's mission, academic programs, student support, governance, planning, and institutional effectiveness; the next evaluation cycle is scheduled for 2033–2034.[4] The Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education continues as the school's programmatic nursing accreditor.[4]

In 2022, the school was renamed from Phillips School of Nursing at Mount Sinai Beth Israel to Mount Sinai Phillips School of Nursing.[3] The renaming was announced alongside the unveiling of new facilities in Upper Manhattan and was connected to what the school described as its 120th anniversary. That anniversary aligns with the handbook's 1902 date for the first Beth Israel nursing class, rather than the 1904 founding date stated elsewhere in the same Mount Sinai announcement.[1][3] Mount Sinai said the expanded campus allowed it to enlarge classes and train more nurses.[3]

The reviewed sources present competing accounts of the present school's founding date and do not fully reconcile its institutional lineage. Mount Sinai materials identify the school as founded in 1904, while the student handbook places the first Beth Israel nursing class in 1902; the 2022 announcement's reference to the school's "120th anniversary" also aligns with the 1902 date.[3][1] A centennial history of Mount Sinai Hospital separately documents a Mount Sinai Training School for Nurses incorporated in February 1881 and opened in March of that year.[2] None of the reviewed sources clearly establishes an institutional chain connecting that historically separate Mount Sinai program to the present-day school.

Nursing education in the United States retained Christian institutional underpinnings as late as the 1950s, and Jewish quotas on admission to nursing schools persisted well into the twentieth century.[12] The Mount Sinai training school's nonsectarian character and its deliberate efforts to recruit Jewish applicants responded to that wider exclusionary environment.[2] Beth Israel's nursing program arose in a hospital established to serve Jewish immigrants and drew students from foreign-born communities.[1]