Each week, Texas Children’s publishes a newspaper ad and companion website featuring our milestones as part of the Houston Chronicle’s historic Houston Legends series.
Click here for this week’s feature.
Texas Children’s Hospital is proud to be a part of the Houston Chronicle’s 115th year celebration, which kicked off this week. To mark this occasion, the Houston Chronicle launched a six-month commemorative series that will tell the dramatic stories of Houston as “A City That Could.”
As part of this historic event, each daily publication of the Chronicle will feature an editorial section highlighting Houston’s iconic people, events, business, culture, medical and sciences, sports and major events.
Texas Children’s is the honored sponsor for every Tuesday’s “Houston Legends” series. For more than 20 weeks, we will showcase the legendary care Texas Children’s has provided since 1954, and focus on milestone moments in our unique history. Also, a complementary website offers a more detailed look at our past, our story and our breakthroughs.
On the right is the Texas Children’s ad that was featured in the Chronicle. Click the ad to visit our companion website at texaschildrens.org/legendarycare. The website will change weekly to complement the newspaper ad, which will be published in section A of the Chronicle on Tuesdays for the next 22 weeks. We also will spotlight this special feature weekly on Connect, so stay tuned to learn and share our rich history.
One of Texas Children’s main objectives is to provide the right care at the right time at the right place. Fulfilling that mission just got easier with the installation of a new Interventional Radiology Suite at Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus.
Equipped with a customizable interventional X-ray imaging system from Toshiba America Medical Systems, Inc., the new suite will enable physicians to provide a wider range of image-guided procedures to patients and families in the West Houston area without having to send them across town to Texas Children’s in the Texas Medical Center.
“This suite gives us the ability to have a full-service radiology department at West Campus, making the future of radiology at the community hospital even brighter,” said Texas Children’s Radiology-In-Chief Dr. George S. Bisset at a ribbon cutting event for the new suite. “I’m very excited about what this new addition will bring to the hospital, our medical staff, and most importantly, our patients.”
Texas Children’s Chief of Interventional Radiology Dr. Kamlesh Kukreja said interventional radiology helps physicians keep every child they see as healthy as they can be and as comfortable as possible during their visit to the hospital or clinic.
“I’m looking forward to this service growing significantly at West Campus,” Kukreja said.
The new state-of-the-art suite is equipped with Toshiba’s Infinix-i’s C-arm design that offers conformity to any patient, allowing for optimal angulations, streamlined positioning and customizable configuration. In addition, the Infinix-i’s ergonomic enhancement improves clinician speed and precision while reducing the potential for strain and injury. Another important feature is the real-time Dose Tracking System that provides real-time data on the delivery of radiation in the form of easy-to-read color-coded human map.
“In pediatrics, radiation exposure is a key concern and dose management continues to be an important focus assuring maximum benefits under the highest safety standards for the patients,” said Sadia Nasir, assistant director of radiology at West Campus. “The Dose Monitoring System, in combination with dose management and reduction technologies, such as, Spot Fluororscopy will allow the interventionists to instantaneously monitor and minimize patient’s X-ray skin dose in real time during the procedures.”
Matt Schaefer, vice president of West Campus, said the need for additional radiology services at West Campus has continued to grow ever since the community hospital opened its doors more than five years ago.
“The opening of this new, state-of-the-art Interventional Radiology Suite is simply another step toward meeting those needs and providing patients with the highest quality of pediatric care.” he said.
To learn more about Texas Children’s interventional radiology services, click here.
More than 300 members of the Texas Children’s Hospital Department of Surgery attended the sixth annual Edmond T. Gonzales, Jr., Surgical Research Day on May 6. The event provided a forum for researchers across the department to showcase their work.
“I really look forward to this day every year where we get a chance to highlight some of the important research being conducted in the department,” said Dr. Charles D. Fraser, Jr., surgeon-in-chief at Texas Children’s Hospital. “Creating new knowledge is central to our core values as academic surgeons at Texas Children’s Hospital.”
This year 122 abstracts were submitted for review. Eleven of these abstracts were chosen for oral presentations on Surgical Research Day and 111 were accepted for poster presentations. This year eight students vied for the Best Presentation award and three faculty members were chosen to present their research.
The 2016 keynote speaker was Dr. Rebecca Richards-Kortum from Rice University. She is the Malcolm Gillis University Professor, a professor of Bioengineering and a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Richards-Kortum is also director of two institutes – Rice 360° Institute for Global Health and the Institute of Biosciences and Bioengineering – and the founder of Beyond Traditional Borders. She spoke about “Technologies to Improve Pediatric and Surgical Care in Low-Resource Settings.”
Payal Cramer, a health care attorney from Baker Hostetler, LLP gave an ethics presentation on “Patient Privacy and Research” specifically discussing extracting research from electronic medical records.
Awards presented at the event were the Samuel Stal Research Award for outstanding research by a resident or fellow, the Research Mentor Award, and Best Oral Presentation and Best Poster Presentation.
The Samuel Stal Research Award was presented to pediatric and adolescent gynecology fellow Dr. Julie Hakim for her work in pediatric device development. The award is named after Dr. Samuel Stal, former chief of Plastic Surgery at Texas Children’s.
Dr. Jed Nuchtern, chief of Pediatric Surgery, was honored with the Research Mentor Award. The award is given on an annual basis to honor a Department of Surgery faculty member who serves as a research mentor through career development, professional guidance or cultivation of research interests.
Dr. Yangyang Yu, a researcher in Pediatric Surgery, received the Best Oral Presentation award for her presentation on “Time-Driven, Activity-Based Costing to Identify Opportunities for Cost Reduction in Pediatric Appendectomy.”
Best Poster award was given to Chi-Han Lu from Pediatric Surgery for his work “Pseudotyped AAV Vector-Mediated Gene Transfer in a Human Fetal Trachea Xenograft Model: Implications for In Utero Gene Therapy for Cystic Fibrosis.”
The Surgical Research Day Planning Committee included Dr. Jed Nuchtern (chair), Melinda Mathis (co-chair), Dr. Swathi Balaji, Dr. Jennifer Dietrich, Dr. Chester Koh, Dr. Lingkun Kong, Dr. Sandi Lam, Dr. Liz McCullum, Dr. Scott Rosenfeld, Kathy Carberry, RN, Matthew Girotto, Angie Rangel, Veronica Victorian, Anissa Quiroz, Stacey Staples, Shon Bower and Laura Higgins.
More than 120 people recently attended Texas Children’s Hospital’s annual Craniosynostosis Reunion, which honors families whose children have undergone craniosynostosis surgery at the hospital.
Donned in superhero T-shirts and capes, patients and their families enjoyed a day filled with games, socializing and laughter as they celebrated healed scars, which were barely visible in the patients’ hair. Families shared stories and remembered the hope and strength they received when their child had surgery.
At Texas Children’s, the comprehensive Craniosynostosis Surgery Program brings together a multidisciplinary team of pediatric neurosurgeons and plastic surgeons as well as geneticists, ophthalmologists, social workers, otolaryngologists and anesthesiologists to meet the needs of each patient.
“It is a privilege to take care of children,” said Dr. Sandi Lam, pediatric neurosurgeon and co-director of the Craniosynostosis Surgery Program at Texas Children’s. “We are lucky to be able to support and connect patients and families in a meaningful way, beyond surgery. Seeing these children and families reminds us why we do what we do every day.”
Led by Lam and Dr. Laura Monson, pediatric plastic surgeon and the program’s co-director, Texas Children’s Craniosynostosis Surgery Program is among the largest in the country, offering a spectrum of treatment strategies including minimally invasive surgery and complex reconstructions. For more information about the program, visit the website.
Billie Casteel, Mary Kana, Lorraine Cogan, Show Bower and Sarah Colton organized the annual Craniosynostosis Reunion event, mobilizing other dedicated Texas Children’s staff and volunteers. A special treat was “SteveO,” a Houston area professional photographer who graciously volunteered his services for this special Texas Children’s Hospital event.
Watch this video to see the steady progress being made on the construction of Texas Children’s Hospital The Woodlands.
Texas Children’s Hospital is proud to announce the American College of Surgeons (ACS) has verified the hospital as a Level 1 Children’s Surgery Center.
The one-year verification was awarded following an extensive pilot site visit in May 2015. During the visit, Texas Children’s assisted in the review and refinement of guidelines set forth by ACS with the goal of improving the safety and quality of pediatric surgery performed at centers across the country. At this time, Texas Children’s is among only two Level 1 Children’s Surgery Centers in the United States, and the only children’s hospital in Texas and the southwest region to earn this distinction.
“We are honored to be one of the inaugural hospitals to receive this esteemed verification,” said Texas Children’s Surgeon-In-Chief Dr. Charles D. Fraser Jr. “As a leader in pediatric surgical care, we believe it is important for children to undergo surgery with a focused, dedicated team of specialized pediatric surgeons, anesthesiologists, radiologists, intensivists, nurses, staff and support departments committed to pediatric care. We carefully track our outcomes with the goal of providing the best possible results. We are honored to be recognized for our commitment to high-quality care for our patients.”
A Level 1 verification requires Texas Children’s to provide surgery and anesthesia for all major pediatric specialties for children of all ages – from premature infants to adolescents. Additionally, the hospital must have not only the highest level Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), pediatric emergency medicine physicians and pediatric radiologists available all day, every day, but also the most robust data collection, outcomes assessment and quality improvement efforts.
A team of 25 physicians, nurses and members of the administration, anesthesiology, nursing, the outcomes and impact service, the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), quality, radiology, surgery and transport teams served on Texas Children’s ACS verification committee.
The Department of Surgery at Texas Children’s represents more than 90 full-time pediatric-focused surgeons who are also faculty members at Baylor. Surgeons, advanced practice providers and more than 700 Texas Children’s staff members are dedicated to caring for and improving the health of children through patient care, education and research. The team’s efforts are evident in the more than 26,700 operative cases performed, more than 1,200 trauma admissions and 144,800 outpatient clinic visits in 2015.
For more information about Texas Children’s Department of Surgery, visit texaschildrens.org/surgery.
For more information about the Level 1 Children’s Surgery Center verification, visit the ACS website.