Get to Know Your Hospital - Dr. Frank Silagy

By Matthew Avitabile

DELHI - Dr. Frank Silagy has been a trustee of Delhi’s O'Connor Hospital since 2021 after working as a family medicine physician for his medical career.

Dr. Silagy attended medical school at Tufts University and did his residency training at the University of Rochester Family Medicine Program. Following residency, he and his wife, Marthe Gold, also a family physician came to Delhi and started Delhi Family Medicine, an entity they established, as part of the A. Lindsey and Olive B. O'Connor Hospital. Their interest in the overall health of the communities they served, beyond the patients they directly cared for led to receiving grants from the National Rural Health Association and the New York State Health Department. The understanding of the needs of the community obtained through this work ultimately resulted in the creation of Bassett Healthcare Network’s first school-based health center at Delaware Academy in 1992.

Dr. Silagy also facilitated the affiliation of O'Connor Hospital with Bassett Healthcare Network in 1990, which he credits with "saving the hospital from closure and enabling it to adapt to the current medical environment".

After leaving O'Connor, Dr. Silagy initially joined the faculty at Georgetown University Medical School and subsequently worked at Montefiore/Einstein in NYC, retiring in 2012 from active practice.

Distinct from the clinician role, Dr. Silagy reports that the responsibilities of being a board member carry responsibility for fiduciary and administrative matters. He reflected on the collegial relationship board members share. Dr. Silagy shared that his focus as a board member is trying to address the "social determinants of health", such as peoples' economic status, education level, transportation, housing and nutrition needs, and access to health care. It is these factors that impact a community and its citizen's health and underlie its overall wellness. In that light, Dr. Silagy helped spearhead a partnership between the O’Connor Hospital board and the Office of the Aging of Delaware County to deliver food boxes to people with food insecurity. Now completing its second year, the program served over 200 seniors and distributed over 2600 boxes of locally grown vegetables and fruits. He credits the network's current leadership for their support and help in establishing this initiative. He sees this as an example of the hospital responding to unmet needs of our community. "Healthcare may not be intuitively involved in these things but it is actually part of our mission statement, to promote the well-being in our communities." Dr. Silagy states that O'Connor Hospital has a. "family presence" and its caring atmosphere is a vital part of the ethos of the hospital. At O'Connor, staff provide high quality care for our neighbors and fulfill the hospital’s mission as a "critical access hospital".