October 10, 2017

Three years ago, Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus opened an eight-bed Pediatric Intensive Care Unit thanks to a generous $1 million donation by the Lauren and Lara Camillo family. On October 9, the last chunk of a $50 million capital improvement effort expanded the unit to 22 beds, providing Texas Children’s West Campus and the entire Texas Children’s system with an opportunity to serve more patients and families that need our care.

“This is a huge milestone for West Campus,” said Executive Vice President Michelle Riley-Brown at a ribbon cutting event and celebration. “Our staff has worked tirelessly on this project and the reward of being able to offer more to our patients and families is well worth it.”

Initially, 16 of the beds will be used for intensive care and six will be for acute care. Two of the intensive care beds have negative pressure capability and can be used for isolation. All of the beds provide more privacy for our patients and families, as well as better visibility and workflow for our nurses and other medical staff.

Located on the fourth floor of the hospital and painted in calming pastels, the unit expansion includes two large nursing stations, an advanced practice provider workspace, a simulation room, nutrition room, lactation room, call room and conference space.

The patient rooms are spacious and have a private bathroom and seating/sleep area for family. The rooms are lined with windows that face outside, letting in sunlight and allowing for great views of the hospital grounds and surrounding community. And, sliding doors permit visibility and quickly allow the care team access to the patient to address any emergency.

Equipment in the rooms and on the floor is robust and includes two blood gas machines for respiratory therapy and additional nurse station monitors. In the future, some of the rooms will be able to offer patients who need dialysis the capability of doing so from the comfort of their beds.

“When West Campus first opened, we thought we would be a stopover for patients waiting to be transferred to Main Campus, but that’s not the case, especially now with our expanded capacity,” said PICU Medical Director Dr. Matthew Pesek. “We have the ability to treat just about any patient who comes our way, no matter how complex.”

Karen Sripan, assistant clinical director of the PICU, agreed and said the planning and design of the PICU expansion began in March 2016 and was comprehensive with the goal of having an environment that allows the PICU staff to do more for their patients.

“We were very thoughtful in our design and engaged staff throughout the entire process,” Sripan said. “We also were mindful of ensuring room design consistency with the Woodlands PICU so that the layout of the rooms are familiar to staff and providers working at both campuses.”

Dr. Hsiao-Tuan Chao received the 2017 Outstanding Junior Member Award from the Child Neurology Society for her discovery of the genetic cause of a neurodevelopmental condition known as the Hypotonia Ataxia and Developmental Disorder Syndrome.

Chao is the clinical instructor in pediatric neurology at Baylor College of Medicine and physician-scientist at the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute (NRI) at Texas Children’s in the laboratory of Dr. Hugo J. Bellen.

Through large-scale collaborative efforts with the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN) and Baylor Genetics Laboratory (BGL), Chao’s research studies revealed the pathogenic role of damaging genetic changes in Early B-Cell Factor 3 (EBF3) in neurodevelopment and cognition. Her research continues to focus on elucidating the role of EBF3 dysfunction and transcriptional dysregulation of neural circuits in highly prevalent childhood disorders such as intellectual disability and autism spectrum disorder.

Dr. Davut Pehlivan, a medical resident in pediatric neurology and physician-scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in the laboratory of Dr. James Lupski, is the recipient of the 2017 M. Richard KoenigsBerger Scholarship Award from the Child Neurology Society for his studies related to arthrogryposis patients.

Pehlivan analyzed 108 arthrogryposis families using whole exam sequencing approach as part of Baylor-Hopkins Center for Mendelian Genomics initiative. His studies made important contributions to understanding the disease pathogenesis by showing evidence for oligogenic inheritance in arthrogryposis and yielded several novel genes causing arthrogryposis.

The Child Neurology Society established this scholarship award in 2013 to honor the memory of . The awardee is selected between CNS Junior Members/residents submitting the best abstract in the areas of neonatal neurology, genetic diseases, HIV or metabolic disorders.

September 19, 2017

Since the topping out celebration of Texas Children’s Legacy Tower nearly seven month ago, significant construction milestones have been reached inside the tower’s 400-foot-tall structure at Texas Children’s Medical Center campus.

Carefully designed to promote the safest possible environment to care for our most critically ill patients and their families, construction is underway on the patient care rooms in the cardiovascular intensive care unit (CVICU), pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) and the progressive care unit (PCU). Last year, a series of patient care simulations were conducted to identify and eliminate any latent safety defects in the final design of the critical care tower before actual construction began.

Based on helpful feedback from our providers and patient families, the size of the critical care rooms inside the Legacy Tower will be between 350 to 450 square feet – three times the size of the hospital’s current ICU rooms. The rooms will feature a dedicated family space, a bathroom and shower, and care teams will have enhanced visibility and monitoring between patient rooms and into the patient rooms from the nurses’ work stations. The ICU rooms also will be equipped with state-of-the-art technology including a boom that will provide gas, power and data from the ceiling.

“Booms allow us to position the patient almost anywhere in the 360-degree circle,” said Chief of Critical Care Medicine Dr. Lara Shekerdemian. “This means that we can use some very state-of-the-art equipment for mounting all of the pumps, monitors and ventilators at the patient’s bedside while keeping the equipment off the floor.”

The Legacy Tower’s high intensity operating rooms and intraoperative state-of-the-art MRI suite also will provide dedicated subspecialty care for surgical patients.

“Our pediatric surgical patients are different than other ICU patients,” said Texas Children’s Chief of Plastic Surgery Dr. Larry Hollier. “For the first time, we’re going to have them in a setting where the care is designed specifically for that surgical patient, and that’s going to be located one floor above the operating rooms. The new tower will help us increase our OR capacity so we are not turning patients away from receiving critical care.”

The Legacy Tower will open in two phases. The first phase will occur in May 2018 when the PICU, PCU, operating rooms and Radiology open. A few months later, the Heart Center will move into the new tower in August 2018.

The 25-floor Legacy Tower will house 126 beds for pediatric and cardiovascular intensive care, six new operating rooms (ORs) with the latest technology to complement the hospital’s existing 19 ORs, and will be the new home of Texas Children’s Heart Center, including the outpatient clinic, four cardiovascular ORs and four catheterization labs. This vertical expansion will help reinvest in the programs needed to provide the highest level of care to our most critically ill patients.

“I don’t know of any other children’s hospital in the country that has the type of experience that Texas Children’s has in bringing all of these elements together,” Hollier said. “With larger, more functional spaces, we will be able to provide patients and families with the best possible environment to receive care.”

August 15, 2017

The National Ebola Training and Education Center (NETEC) recently partnered with Texas Children’s to host a groundbreaking Pediatric Simulation Conference.

Held on August 10 and 11 at Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus, the conference was the first pediatric simulation course of its kind for the NETEC, which is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR).

The NETEC is comprised of faculty and staff from Emory University, the University of Nebraska Medical Center/Nebraska Medicine and the New York Health and Hospitals Corporation, Bellevue Hospital Center. All three of these health care institutions have safely and successfully treated patients with Ebola and have worked diligently to share their knowledge with other health care facilities and public health jurisdictions.

These adult institutions receive funding to train all of the CDC-funded U.S. Ebola treatment and assessment centers in hospital preparedness. They have hosted successful training and simulation courses but none have been pediatrics based. The NETEC chose to come to Texas Children’s to host its premiere Pediatric Simulation Course because of the knowledge and expertise the health system has honed during the past few years since the most recent Ebola outbreak in 2014.

Less than a year after the outbreak, Texas Children’s built and opened the unique Texas Children’s Special Isolation Unit (SIU) so that the health system would be prepared to handle emerging infections as an institution. As a result, the state and the CDC designated Texas Children’s Hospital as one of several pediatric Ebola treatment centers countrywide.

Texas Children’s SIU is the only one of its kind in Texas and the southwest region, and is among the few in the United States designated just for children. Located on the fifth floor of West Campus, the eight-bed unit is fully equipped to care for any infant or child with a serious communicable disease and has all of the measures available to assure safety of the health care team, other patients and their families.

Children coming to the SIU will receive top notch care from a team of highly-trained staff, led by Dr. Amy Arrington, medical director and nursing leader, Sondra Morris.

“This was a great opportunity to show off our unit, our amazing team and our intuition,” Arrington said. “I am quite proud of how hard the SIU team has worked to make sure everyone at the conference had the best possible experience, and I know they all left here knowing Texas Children’s Hospital is more than prepared for any serious communicable disease in the pediatric population.”

Approximately 35 people from around the nation attended the pediatric simulation conference, which consisted of both lectures and clinical simulations, led by 10 NETEC faculty and 10 SIU course directors. Examples of topics covered included: donning and doffing, nursing care considerations in a pediatric biocontainment unit, ethical concerns, and immersive pediatric simulations held is the SIU.

Barb Craft, a clinical service line director with Kapi’olani Medical Center for Women & Children in Honolulu, attended the conference and said it and Texas Children’s SIU were amazing.

“Your SIU is so well thought out and a model for any isolation unit, be it adult or Pediatric,” Craft said. “I would highly recommend this course and would like more of Dr. Arrington and her staff’s experience shared in future offerings.”

August 8, 2017

Texas Children’s is a large and growing health system with many specialties and sub-specialties. We take care of the sickest of the sick and provide routine pediatric care to otherwise healthy children. Many times that care involves not one medical expert but a team of medical experts, including pediatric anesthesiologist.

“The core role of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine is to provide surgical anesthesia, but we are not just in the operating room,” Anesthesiologist-In-Chief Dr. Dean B. Andropoulos said. “We provide care in radiology, our Pain Medicine Clinic, in the Intensive Care Units, and at all three Texas Children’s Hospital campuses. We also are in the laboratory doing cutting edge research, writing some of the top textbooks in our field, and educating and training the next generation of pediatric anesthesiologists.”

During a recent Department of Surgery Grand Rounds, Andropoulos discussed the strategic goals of his growing department and how it touches almost every aspect of patient care.

The department’s 78 pediatric anesthesiologists represent the largest group of pediatric anesthesiologists in the country. All are board certified or are in the process of becoming board certified and all provide anesthetic care in almost 60 locations on a daily basis.

Across these locations, Texas Children’s anesthesiologists were involved in 43,456 cases last year, a 36 percent increase from the number of cases anesthesiologists participated in seven years ago. The majority of the cases worked last year, 68 percent, occurred in the operating room. The remaining 32 percent of cases happened outside the OR in various inpatient and outpatient settings.

“The fact that we do more than 40,000 anesthetics in a year lends to the level of expertise of our group,” said Medical Director of Perioperative Services Dr. Chris Glover. “I don’t know of another place where you can take your child to get the amount of expertise that exists here.”

This level of expertise was recently exemplified by the expansion of the Pre-Anesthesia Screening Service (PASS) Clinic to Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus and Texas Children’s Hospital The Woodlands. These clinics are involved in pre-anesthetic consultation and planning for patients with complex medical problems or who are undergoing complicated surgical procedures.

Patients are evaluated by anesthesiology nurse practitioners and anesthesiologists, and an anesthetic plan is developed that is communicated to parents, surgeons and procedural physicians. This planning leads to improved patient and family education, better outcomes and fewer delays and cancellations of surgery. This service emphasizes the increasing role of pediatric anesthesiologists as perioperative physicians whose expertise benefits patients all across the Texas Children’s system.

Being part of an academic center, Baylor College of Medicine, allows the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine to continue to strengthen and grow its already solid knowledge base, Andropoulos said.

In addition to providing top notch clinical care, the department’s clinical staff is involved in numerous clinical and basic science research protocols, many of which are funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Just last year, the department’s faculty published over 40 articles peer reviewed journals. They also served as editor and/or author of eight textbooks, including Anesthesia for Congenital Heart Disease, 3rd Edition. The textbook is the leading reference source for the field.

The department has taken a lead in educating anesthesiologists at Texas Children’s and beyond about the Federal Drug Administration’s recent warning that repeated or lengthy use of general anesthetic and sedation drugs during surgeries or procedures in children younger than 3 or in pregnant women during their third trimester may affect the development of children’s brains.

“Parents know we are up-to-date on the very latest information,” Andropoulos said. They also know we all are aware that taking care of their child is a privilege, a real responsibility that we take extremely seriously.”

Members of the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine are always striving to do better and have set out three primary strategic goals for the next few years. These goals are:

  • To enhance patient experience by design and enhanced method of measuring anesthesiology patients satisfaction data.
  • Expand pain services by creating a strong business model for the service line and engaging and strengthening collaborative partnerships with clinical specialties to increase access to care for pain patients.
  • Increase research grant funding and resources by growing the volume of peer reviewed journal publications and grant proposals in the department and acquiring more funding from major grant proposals.

“We will continue to strengthen and grow our department,” Andropoulos said. “We want to remain one of the top pediatric anesthesiology programs in the country.”

Department leadership and contact information
  • Anesthesiologist-In-Chief, Dr. Dean B. Andropoulos
  • Associate Anesthesiologist-In-Chief Academic Affairs, Dr. Blaine Easley
  • Associate Anesthesiologist-In-Chief Clinical Affairs, Dr. Emad Mossad
  • Medical Director of Perioperative Services, Dr. Chris Glover

For more information about Texas Children’s Hospital Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine, visit the department’s website at http://www.texaschildrens.org/departments/anesthesiology or call ext. 4-5800.

August 1, 2017

Texas Children’s Heart Center has partnered with Project ADAM® to help prevent the deaths of children and adolescents due to sudden cardiac arrest.

Started in Wisconsin in 1999 by a family whose son died from the condition, Project ADAM® helps schools nationwide implement programs to make automated external defibrillators (AEDs) readily available by preparing schools for a cardiac emergency through emergency response plans, staff CPR and AED training, student CPR education and sudden cardiac arrest awareness education.

Melody Stephens brought the program to Houston and reached out to Texas Children’s for help after her 18-year-old son, Cody, fell asleep in a recliner at home and never woke up. Doctors determined the teenager, who had recently been awarded an athletic scholarship to play college football, died from sudden cardiac arrest.

“My primary goal is to help schools to be prepared to respond appropriately to a cardiac emergency so that the victim has the best chance of survival,” Stephens said. “Texas Children’s has embraced the concept and has done everything they can to make schools safer for children with heart conditions.”

Two area schools – Bonnie Holland Elementary in the Katy Independent School District and Crosby Kindergarten in the Crosby Independent School District – have been named Heart Safe Schools through Texas Children’s Hospital’s partnership with Project ADAM®. Five more campuses are awaiting the receipt of the designation and four other schools are in the process of becoming Heart Safe.

In order to become a Heart Safe School, teachers learn about the risks of sudden cardiac arrest as well as CPR training. Texas Children’s physicians and Heart Center team members helped provide the school with the training.

“Texas Children’s Hospital believes prevention is just as important as treatment,” said Texas Children’s Pediatric Cardiologist Dr. Santiago Valdes, who serves as medical director of the local Project ADAM® initiative. “We are more than happy to lend our expertise to these schools while they check items off of the required checklist needed to become a Heart Safe School.”

For more information about Project ADAM® click here. To read a Texas Children’s blog post by Stephens about her and her son’s experience with sudden cardiac arrest, click here.

July 18, 2017

Three years ago, Texas Children’s Hospital West Campus opened an eight-bed Pediatric Intensive Care Unit thanks to a generous $1 million donation by the Lauren and Lara Camillo family. This fall, the last chunk of a $50 million capital improvement effort will expand the unit to 22 beds.

Construction on the project hit a midway point this summer and is expected to be complete in October, providing Texas Children’s West Campus and the entire Texas Children’s system with an opportunity to serve more patients and families that need our care.

Initially, 16 of the beds will be used for intensive care and six will be for acute care. Two of the intensive care beds will have negative pressure and can be used for isolation. All of the beds provide more privacy for our patients and families, as well as better visibility and workflow for our nurses and other medical staff.

Located on the fourth floor of the hospital and painted in calming pastels, the unit expansion includes two large nursing stations advanced practice provider workspace, a simulation room, nutrition room, lactation room, call room and conference space.

The patient rooms are spacious and have a private bathroom and seating/sleep area for family. The rooms are lined with windows that face outside, letting in sunlight and allowing for great views of the hospital grounds and surrounding community. The rooms also include several windows that face nursing stations and adjoining rooms, giving medical staff ample visibility at all times.

Equipment in the rooms and on the floor is robust and includes two blood gas machines for respiratory therapy and additional nurse station monitors. In the future, some of the rooms will be able to offer patients who need dialysis the capability of doing so from the comfort of their beds.

Also in the future, six of the rooms will have the ability to be converted into Neonatal Intensive Care Unit rooms. As a result, the unit will incorporate NICU design features such as a family transition room, lactation room and separate entrances to the NICU section of the unit.

“The design of this unit is extremely family friendly,” said Erica Ventura, one of three patient care managers in the PICU. “From the patient rooms to the nursing stations, everything is being constructed with the patient and the medical staff in mind.”

Karen Sripan, assistant clinical director of the PICU, agreed and said the planning and design of the PICU expansion has been going on since March 2016 and was comprehensive.

“We were very thoughtful in our design and engaged staff throughout the entire process,” Sripan said. “We also were mindful of ensuring room design consistency with the Woodlands PICU so that the layout of the rooms are familiar to staff and providers working at both campuses.

PICU Medical Director Dr. Matthew Pesek said he is very excited about the expansion and working in a space that is so geared toward patients, families and medical staff.

“Our staff will have a lot more mobility due to the large size of the patient rooms and families will have a lot more privacy,” Pesek said. “These two things alone will go a long way.”

The PICU expansion is the last project funded by a $50 million capital improvement effort that aimed at growing West Campus’ capacity and capability. To date the following projects have been completed:

  • Additional office and administrative support space for dedicated physicians and providers
  • An 18-bed expansion of the hospital’s acute care capacity, including a special isolation unit designed for children with highly contagious infectious diseases
  • Conversion of offices within ambulatory clinics into additional exam rooms to increase outpatient subspecialty access
  • A dedicated suite for Interventional Radiology service
  • A new 14 exam room clinic for Neurology, Renal & Dermatology

“Since the hospital opened in 2010, West Campus has continued to grow along with its surrounding communities,” said West Campus Assistant Vice President Sara Montenegro. “Texas Children’s is committed to continuing this growth and support of our patients and families in West Houston.”