Children’s hospitals are not adult hospitals with toys and cute graphics. They are places of science, full of people with the passion and will to push the limits of what is possible for the life of a child and the future of a family.
The Safest Environment for the Care of Children
While sick children are routinely cared for by office-based pediatricians and general hospitals throughout the nation, some communities are able to offer a higher level of medical care to those precious patients. In the safest communities, primary care pediatricians have a children’s hospital to which they refer cases that require intensive or specialized treatment. But this resource is relatively rare. There are only 45 freestanding children’s hospitals in the United States. In the surrounding communities, families with medically fragile children may take comfort in the knowledge that care is down the street—not in another county or a plane ride away.
Great children’s hospitals become centers of gravity that attract the best, brightest, and most committed people for the care of children. Children’s hospitals are complex institutions created by an almost alchemic set of ingredients that take decades to evolve and mature. These hospitals exist only in urban areas where demographic factors, academic institutions, and philanthropic resources are capable of supporting their requirements for scale and innovation.
In a children’s hospital, elite pediatric subspecialists and surgeons are surrounded by highly skilled nurses and allied health professionals, all
of whom are supported by clinical, academic, research, business, and physical systems solely dedicated to children. Their organizational focus and momentum enable them to offer the broadest and deepest services available for children anywhere—advanced cancer treatments, heart surgery, neonatal care, neurology and neurosurgery, complex orthopaedic interventions—in many cases, services that apply emerging science and early clinical advances to the immediate care of children.
Children’s hospitals offer families hope when there are few options left. Whether a child suffers from a short-term illness or a chronic condition, children’s hospitals provide the safest medical and psychosocial environments for healing because they are focused on the unique needs of young people and families.
Children are not small adults. Children’s hospitals are not adult hospitals with toys and cute graphics. They are places of science, full of people with the passion and will to push the limits of what is possible for the life of a child and the future of a family.
