May 29, 2018

Ten-year-old Skye Jeary couldn’t believe her eyes as she was wheeled into her new, spacious room in Texas Children’s Legacy Tower. She was in awe when she saw the size of her room and commented on how she’ll have plenty of space to accommodate her stuffed unicorn and her mom who is in a wheelchair.

On May 22, Texas Children’s reached an historic milestone when the doors of Legacy Tower opened for the first time to care for our most critically ill patients. Beginning at 7 a.m., seven specially trained clinical teams began safely transporting 45 critically ill patients from the pediatric intensive care unit and progressive care unit in West Tower to their new, spacious, state-of-the-art critical care rooms in Legacy Tower.

More than 150 Texas Children’s staff members were involved in the patient move to Legacy Tower, and the careful transfer of the patients took seven hours, which was a lot sooner than originally anticipated due to the efficiency and effectiveness of the Legacy Tower teams involved on Move Day.

“The planning for the patient move was unbelievably detailed,” said Dr. Lara Shekerdemian, service chief of Critical Care Services at Texas Children’s. “The patient move involved nursing, administration, physicians, nurse practitioners, all members of the team as well as the amazing family support team that guided the families through what could have been a potentially overwhelming event for them.”

Patient and family services teams were assigned to each family member to help accompany and escort them from their current unit to the new unit in Legacy Tower and to get them settled in their new rooms.

“Our families were so excited about the move,” said Michelle Lawson, director of Texas Children’s Clinical Support Services. “They were being cheered on along the way and they were excited to be in their brand new space. They couldn’t believe we built it just for them.”

The Legacy Tower Go Live Support Center was set up on the fourth floor of Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women and comprised of 867 individuals from across the hospital system who focused on patient move tracking from West Tower to Legacy Tower. The team included support staff from Supply Chain, Security, BioMedical Engineering, Facilities Operations, Information Services, Pharmacy, Respiratory Care, as well as ancillary support teams from Texas Children’s Hospital The Woodlands, Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus and our Health Centers.

“We had floor plans on the wall that were physically tracking the patients as they moved from West Tower to Legacy Tower,” said Matt Timmons, director of Business Operations and Support Services at West Campus. “We also documented it on a spreadsheet displayed on projectors so anybody in the Go Live Support Center knew exactly where our patients were throughout the entire move process.”

While patients were being moved safely to Legacy Tower, Mission Control ensured a smooth process for the patient move by collaborating with teams from the The Woodlands Campus and West Campus to manage the inflow of patients across the system while the move process was underway.

Seven hours after the patient move process began, staff cheered and clapped their hands as the last patient was moved to Legacy Tower.

“We call today the Super Bowl of patient moves,” said Texas Children’s Vice President of Nursing Gail Parazynski. “We observed the tireless leadership, unity, and undying compassion our team has exhibited all week during the first phase of the Legacy Tower Go-Live. The success of this go-live is a true testament to the leadership and dedicated teamwork at Texas Children’s Hospital.”

One day after this historic move, the first surgery was successfully performed in the new state-of-the-art operating room in Legacy Tower.

View the photo gallery of the patient move to Legacy Tower below. Click here to read the story of the first surgery in Legacy Tower and watch video of the state-of-the-art features of our new OR in Legacy Tower.

The second phase of Legacy Tower will open in September and house Texas Children’s Heart Center®, ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for cardiology and heart surgery.

May 15, 2018

Texas Children’s recently participated in a large-scale exercise focusing on the transport of an Ebola-positive pediatric patient from a facility in The Woodlands to Texas Children’s Special Isolation Unit at Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-designated pediatric Ebola treatment center for the southwest region, Texas Children’s was chosen to be a part of the exercise organized by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to test the nationwide ability to move patients with highly infectious diseases safely and securely to regional treatment centers.

“Providing safe, high-level care for patients with highly infectious special pathogens, such as the Ebola virus, requires an incredible amount of training and preparation,” said Dr. Amy Arrington, medical director of Texas Children’s Special Isolation Unit. “We do this exceeding well at Texas Children’s Hospital, with a state-of-the-art Special Isolation Unit and incredible team of volunteer health care workers who train regularly to care for these patients. But it is also critical to practice coordinating the transport of these patients as a medical community, between health care facilities.”

More than 50 organizations throughout the nation participated in the exercise, including the Department of State, Department of Transportation, the Regional Ebola Treatment Centers, local and state health and emergency management agencies, hospitals, airport authorities, and non-government organizations.

The exercise focused on moving seven people acting as patients with Ebola symptoms in different regions of the country. At each health care facility, clinical workers simulated the collection and shipment of samples for diagnostic tests to state laboratories, which in turn practiced running the necessary laboratory tests to diagnose the patients with Ebola.

As part of the exercise, each patient received a positive diagnosis. Using appropriate isolation techniques and personal protective equipment, health care workers then took steps to have six of the patients transported by air to designated Regional Ebola Treatment Centers. These patients were placed into mobile biocontainment units for these flights. The pediatric patient was placed into protective equipment and transported by ground ambulance.

“Saving lives during crises requires preparation and training,” said Dr. Robert Kadlec, Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response. “A tremendous amount of coordination, synchronization, and skill is needed to move patients with highly infectious diseases safely. We have to protect the patients and the health care workers caring for those patients. This type of exercise helps ensure that everyone involved is ready for that level of complexity.”

The 2017 Texas Children’s Annual Report website highlighting last year’s growth and success with compelling stories, videos and graphics about our patients, staff, clinical programs and expanding facilities is here! This is the second time the Texas Children’s annual report has been released in a website format offering a dynamic representation of the breadth, depth and growth of our organization.

Titled Texas Children’s Strong, this year’s website illustrates in a special section how Texas Children’s successfully weathered Hurricane Harvey with strong leadership, a unified culture and fierce determination. It also includes an archive page that houses previous Texas Children’s annual reports, giving readers a centralized location to find such rich information about our organization.

Each section of the site – news, notes and numbers – gives readers an opportunity to experience how and why Texas Children’s health care system continues to set records organization wide. You also can hear directly from our President and CEO Mark Wallace in a video address about our accomplishments and what’s to come.

“I’m pleased to share some of the amazing work and triumphs that happened last year at Texas Children’s,” Wallace said. “We were incredibly busy in 2017.”

Read all about it at texaschildrensannualreport.org. Share the link to the online report with friends and colleagues, and encourage them to do the same.

On May 10, Texas Children’s celebrated the soft opening of Texas Children’s Legacy Tower with a special ribbon cutting ceremony and blessing of the new 400-foot-tall building, part of which will officially open on Tuesday, May 22.

In the heart of the Texas Medical Center, more than 200 guests gathered outside Legacy Tower to attend this historic celebration. Guests included members of Texas Children’s Board of Trustees and Executive Council, Services in Chief, In-Chiefs, Chiefs of Service, donors, patient families, as well as Legacy Tower leadership team members and construction partners who together helped bring this massive project to fruition.

Texas Children’s President and CEO Mark Wallace delivered opening remarks and thanked everyone in attendance for their commitment to turning this vision into reality.

“The opening of Legacy Tower is another dream come true for Texas Children’s,” Wallace said. “There are so many people who worked tirelessly to bring us to this day. With 640,000 square feet of space, Legacy Tower will help us continue to serve our patients and their families, particularly children who are critically ill and have complex needs.”

When Phase One of Legacy Tower opens on May 22, the tower will house new state-of-the-art operating rooms with one intraoperative MRI, as well as a new pediatric intensive care unit (ICU), which will span four floors and open with six ORs and 84 ICU beds, including dedicated surgical, neuro and transitional ICU beds.

The second phase of the Legacy Tower will open in September. The tower will be the new home of Texas Children’s Heart Center® – ranked No. 1 in the nation by U.S. News & World Report in cardiology and heart surgery. The Heart Center will have an outpatient clinic, four catheterization labs with one intraprocedural MRI, cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU), four CVORs and cardiology acute care beds. The tower will also have a helistop, allowing for greater access to Texas Children’s most critically ill patients.

During the ribbon cutting event, Texas Children’s Physician-in-Chief Dr. Mark W. Kline and Texas Children’s Surgeon-in-Chief Dr. Larry Hollier delivered their messages of appreciation, and explained what Legacy Tower will mean to our patients and their families.

“As the largest and busiest department of surgery in the country, we are called upon every day to provide some of the most complex surgeries on some of the most sickest children that this world has ever seen,” Hollier said. “The calls come in every day. Legacy Tower is the answer to those calls. I want to thank Mr. Wallace and the Board for the vision that it took to build the tower that rises above us today. It is a testimony to the commitment that they and others have made to show the rest of the world what excellence in pediatric care looks like.”

Kline also thanked the crowd for their commitment to this project, and specifically thanked Texas Children’s Chief of Critical Care Services Dr. Lara Shekerdemian and Chief of Cardiology Dr. Daniel Penny for their instrumental leadership in making Legacy Tower possible. He also shared the thoughtful design that went into building the Legacy Tower to ensure we created the best and safest environment of care for our patients.

“It’s remarkable to walk through the intensive care units and to see the way the equipment has been located, the size of the rooms, the layout, the flow that will occur in patient care in those rooms,” Kline said. “Every detail has been addressed in the most thoughtful manner and in the input from the families has been really extraordinary and absolutely critical to that process.”

After Texas Children’s Chaplain James Denham delivered the blessing, the yellow ribbon was cut to symbolize the completion and imminent opening of the first phase of Legacy Tower. Guests also got a chance to meet Bailey, Texas Children’s new Legacy Tower therapy dog, and take a tour of Legacy Tower.

Texas Children’s Office of Philanthropy organized this event.

Each year as we salute nurses across the country during National Nurses Week from May 6 to May 12, Texas Children’s celebrated our incredible team of more than 3,000 nurses for their many successes, accomplishments and contributions to patient care.

This year’s theme for Nurses Week was Nurses: Inspire, Innovate, Influence. From developing Texas Children’s first-ever Nursing Innovations Solutions Council to partnering with families in the design of patient care rooms in Legacy Tower, our nurses play a key role in developing novel strategies to optimize the care we deliver to our patients and families.

During Nurses Week, the Nursing Retention Council organized several activities that centered on health and wellness to remind our nurses how important it is to take care of themselves so they can provide the best care to their patients. Activities included educational presentations including a presentation on financial wellness, blessing of the hands, massages, a photo booth, cupcakes and punch and special cookie deliveries for all of the units.

On May 9, Texas Children’s Nursing Excellence Awards ceremony honored six recipients for their commitment to improving nursing care and patient outcomes.

The award honorees included:

Staff Nurse of the year: Imelda Salcedo
Preceptor of the year: Melissa Campbell
Rookie of the year: Tanya Facio
Leader of the year: Kerry Sembera
APRN of the year: Emily Charles
Advanced degree: Miranda Rodrigues
Friend of Nursing: Dr. Binita Patel

Jillian Aragon was awarded the 2018 David and Polly Roth Nursing Education Scholarship Fund. This education fund will provide tuition assistance for Texas Children’s employees who have worked in the organization for at least three years and are interested in pursuing a professional nursing degree.

Leanne Petters and Janae Harris received the Molly Mae LeBlanc Nursing Education Scholarship. The scholarship was named in memory of Molly Mae, daughter of Texas Children’s employees Jill and Andy LeBlanc, who passed away at Texas Children’s on May 6, 2017. The purpose of the scholarship is to perpetuate Molly Mae’s memory and recognize nursing staff members for going above and beyond their required job duties to enhance the quality of life for Texas Children’s patients and their families.

The Houston Chronicle Salute to Nurses included Rhonda Bolin from the Spina Bifida Clinic and Allison Carter from Transition Medicine who were among the top 15 award recipients. Click here for more on the Houston Chronicle Salute to Nurses honorees.

In addition to the two nurses honored in the top 15, 23 Texas Children’s nurses were recognized as being among the top 150 in the Greater Houston area.

Max Abogador (Progressive Care Unit)
Heidi Aghajani (Bone Marrow Transplant Unit)
Sandy Alfaro (14 West Tower)
Lauren Altendorf (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit)
Cynthia Baker (Texas Children’s Health Plan: The Center for Children and Women)
Elizabeth Bernard (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit 2)
Jennifer Dalton (Community Clinics)
Lisa Davenport (The Woodlands – Neonatal Intensive Care Unit)
Casey Fontenot (Hayslett) (DSRIP – Pulmonary)
Stacey Foshee (Cardiovasvular Intensive Care Unit)
Stephanie Gonzales-Hughes (Labor and Delivery)
Lauren Harsany-Salinas (Cardiovasvular Intensive Care Unit)
Judy Holloway (West Campus – Nursing Operations Leadership)
Lastenia Holton (Cancer Center and Hematology Center – Outpatient)
Jennifer Hopkins (15 West Tower)
Rachel Leva (Newborn Center)
Winsyl Montojo (Operating Rooms)
Sharon Moreau (Progressive Care Unit)
Lisa Pali (The Woodlands – Multispecialty)
Melissa Silvera (Nursing Operations)
Lynda Tyer-Viola (Nursing Executive)
Emily Weber (Nursing Administration)
Rhonda Wolfe (14 West Tower)

Congratulations to our Texas Children’s nurses for their commitment to our patients and families.

One week before Texas Children’s Legacy Tower opens on Tuesday, May 22, employees and patient families will notice several new changes to our food services at Texas Children’s Medical Center campus. Additional enhancements are underway at Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus and Texas Children’s Hospital The Woodlands to provide more meal options for our employees, staff, patients, and their families as well.

“After receiving constructive feedback from our employees, we wanted to take a proactive approach to improve the food service and dining experience for them as well as our visitors and patient families,” said Senior Vice President Tabitha Rice. “We are very excited to offer these new lunch and dinner options across our three hospital campuses to better serve the needs of our employees and patient families.”

Texas Children’s Medical Center Campus

Starting on May 14, The Fresh Bistro at Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women will extend its hours of operation. Instead of closing at 4 p.m., the Bistro will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday to Friday.

Working late or just too exhausted to cook dinner? The Bistro now offers take-home meal kits available in the On the Go cooler Monday through Thursday. The meal kits offer a protein, starch, and a vegetable for two for $14 plus tax. The items are fully cooked and all you need to do is pop it in the microwave.

The Coffee Corner across from The Fresh Bistro is another convenient place to grab a quick bite to eat. Opened Mondays through Fridays from 6 a.m. to midnight and 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, the Coffee Corner serves fresh coffee, pastries, paninis, soups, salads and On the Go meals.

If you enjoy good old fashioned barbecue, Liberty Street BBQ will be coming to the food court at Mark Wallace Tower beginning in July. Liberty Street BBQ will serve smoked in-house meats, fresh sides, and of course, delicious desserts like banana pudding. The concept will change each month to offer our families and staff a larger variety of food choices.

West Campus and The Woodlands Campus

West Campus and The Woodlands Campus are offering more meal options to enhance the food service experience for our employees, patients and their families.

A Kids’ Corner will provide kid-friendly snack options including fruit and cheese snacks, animal cookies, squeezable apple sauce, string cheese, milk, bottled water and fruit juices.

From barbecue picnics to Louisiana cuisine to South American treats like papusas, the Monthly Chef specials will provide a variety of meals from different parts of the U.S. and around the world.

Meyer Market

Earlier this month, the Meyer Market on the first floor of the Meyer Building, began offering more lunch options for employees. Freshly prepared meals are now available Monday through Friday from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. A calendar menu is posted in Meyer Market and in the first floor lobby of the Meyer Building.

The hot meal options were added to the current point of sale system. Employees can pay by credit card or use their current Meyer Market account. The Fresh Bistro at the Pavilion for Women provides the meals.

For questions related to this article, please contact Michelle Roane at maroane@texaschildrens.org.

Texas Children’s Hospital is proud to announce Dr. Edward Buchanan as chief of plastic surgery effective May 9.

Buchanan, who specializes in pediatric plastic surgery and craniofacial surgery, joined Texas Children’s and Baylor College of Medicine in 2011. Throughout his tenure, he has served in numerous leadership roles and has been integral in many complex cases, including the successful separation of two sets of conjoined twins.

“I am honored to be named to this esteemed leadership position,” said Buchanan. “Our team is committed to helping our patients function at the highest level so they feel and look their best. I am excited to continue to expand our world-class multidisciplinary programs as well as our surgical research and innovation.”

Buchanan earned his medical degree from The Medical University of South Carolina and completed his residency in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine. He also completed a fellowship in craniofacial/pediatric plastic surgery at Seattle Children’s Hospital/Harborview Medical Center. His areas of interest include pediatric craniofacial surgery, cleft lip and palate surgery, facial trauma, maxillary and mandibular distraction, and pediatric oncologic reconstruction.

To learn more visit texaschildrens.org/plasticsurgery.