February 4, 2016

As we walk the spaces of our hospital and clinics…

As we walk the spaces of our hospital and clinics, we observe countless compassionate interactions and dedicated attention to the needs of the children and families who present to us with every possible condition. Each day, we work to fulfill the vision of Ann and Monroe Carell and their family to provide a specialized experience for children in what is often a time of great anxiety and uncertainty for families. As the region’s only comprehensive pediatric health care provider, we offer hope through our innovative clinical programs, our commitment to discovery research and our teaching of the next generation of pediatric providers.

Slightly over a year ago, we launched a capital campaign under the continued leadership of the Carell family, to further the delivery of comprehensive health care to the children of our region. Our Growing to New Heights Campaign supports a four-floor, vertical expansion of the Children’s Hospital and will enable growth of programs and capacity to care for critically ill children, such as the Burney and Schmucker families, whose stories of hope speak to the work we do every day. The design of the new floors continues a tradition of state-of-the-art patient care areas combined with specialized spaces to support the needs of families.

Our new spaces also will enable continued program growth for more complex conditions or injuries. Our ability to bring together expertise across disciplines has resulted in our hospital ranking in 10 out of 10 pediatric specialties in the annual U.S. News and World Report, with five of our clinical programs in the top 20 in the country. We feature our 12th-ranked orthopaedic program—which treats not only less complex sprains and broken bones but has multidisciplinary programs to care for children with more chronic bone conditions or more acute injuries sustained from trauma.

As we care for more than 1,400 children every day who are in varying stages of illness, we also hope to help keep children healthy. We promote pediatric preventive health measures across all of our care settings. We also have the unique ability to link discovery research to both care of chronic disease and also prevention in healthy children. Another U.S. News and World Report-ranked program is our pediatric endocrinology program. A major focus for this team is management and treatment of children with type 1 diabetes. Through their leadership in an international consortium, TrialNet, this team is seeking to prevent the onset of type 1 diabetes in high-risk healthy children.

We have offered you a sampling of the many stories of hope that we are privileged to experience on a daily basis. Though models of health care are changing, we are building upon decades of commitment to specialized medical and surgical services as we grow to new heights, expand to new communities and develop new programs centering on clinical care and discovery. We do what we do every day because of the support and commitment of our outstanding faculty, staff and community. The stories here reflect the hope we provide through our services and our ever-present dedication to children and their families.

Sincerely,

Luke Gregory, FACHE
Chief executive officer

Meg Rush, M.D.
Chief of staff and executive medical director

John W. Brock III, M.D.
Surgeon-in-chief, director of the Division of Pediatric Urology and Monroe Carell Jr. Professor

Steven Webber, MBChB, MRCP
Pediatrician-in-chief, chair of the Department of Pediatrics and James C. Overall Professor