Founded in 1907, Seattle Children’s Hospital is known for providing excellent patient care with compassion and respect, and conducting leading-edge pediatric research. The hospital also serves as a respected educational resource for patients, families and health care professionals. Accreditations include JCAHO, CARF, CORF, CAP and Magnet status in nursing. The hospital works in partnership with Seattle Children’s Research Institute and Seattle Children’s Hospital Foundation. Together they are Seattle Children’s, known for setting new standards in superior patient care and providing hope, care and cures for more than 100 years.

Ranked as one of the best children’s hospitals in the country by U.S. News & World Report, Children’s serves as the pediatric and adolescent academic medical referral center for the largest landmass of any children’s hospital in the country (Washington, Alaska, Montana and Idaho). As such, outreach and telemedicine play unique roles in many of the hospital’s services.

Networks of regional critical care ground and air transport bring patients to Children’s from community hospitals located throughout the 4-state region. The hospital services also include child life, social work, pastoral care, interpreter services, respiratory therapy, nutritional care, occupational therapy, speech therapy and physical therapy. 

In addition to nearly 60 subspecialty clinics from Adolescent Medicine to Virology, Children’s provides comprehensive care through day surgery, outpatient clinics, 24-hour emergency services including surgery, and after-hours care. State-of-the-art diagnostic services including cardiac imaging, brain perfusion studies, cardiac-catheterization, magnetic resonance imaging, sleep studies, and EEG video monitoring are available.

Children’s uses a modified version of the Toyota Production System called Continuous Performance Improvement (CPI) to evaluate and improve health care from the patient and family point of view. CPI work helps improve the quality of care and service, access to specialists, safety of the hospital environment and the engagement of staff.

As the primary pediatric training site for the University of Washington School of Medicine, Children’s provides broad experiences for more than 700 residents and fellows through clinical rotations each year, with residency and fellowship appointments at Children’s generally totaling 150-175.

Pediatric research at Seattle Children’s Research Institute is a strategic priority. Children’s research is supported by nearly $20 million in National Institutes of Health grants in fiscal year 2007. The institute has nine major centers, and is internationally recognized for advancing discoveries in cancer, genetics, immunology, pathology, infectious disease, injury prevention and bioethics.

At the forefront of leading-edge pediatric cancer treatment, prevention and research, Children’s is nationally known for high survival rates and top rankings in cancer care. Significant partnerships with the University of Washington, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance help to establish Children’s as a national innovator in pediatric cancer care. Children’s cancer program ranked fifth in the nation, according to U.S. News & World Report in 2008.  

Seattle Children’s Hospital Guild Association is the largest all-volunteer fundraising network for any hospital in the country, serving as the umbrella non-profit organization for nearly 7,000 women, men and teens and 500 groups of friends, families, co-workers and community members. Efforts of the Guild Association and Foundation support the clinical and research endeavors at Children’s and provide uncompensated care funds so that all children in the region can receive the care they need regardless of their ability to pay.

Statistics:
• 250 beds
• 13,550 hospital admissions (70% from children with chronic conditions)
• 4,839 inpatient surgeries
• 176,608 clinic visits
• 37,150 emergency visits
• 978 medical staff members, including 565 hospital-based physicians
• 3,973 hospital staff
• 1,110 volunteers
• $65.4 million in uncompensated care delivered
• 546 research staff at Seattle Children’s Research Institute

Care Highlights:
• Children’s was ranked eighth best children’s hospital in the nation by U.S. News & World Report, moving up from previous rankings.
• Drs. Patrick Healey and Jorge Reyes performed the first intestinal transplant in a six-state region on an 8-year-old boy who had been nourished intravenously since birth.
• Drs. Gordon Cohen and Lester Permut became the first cardiac surgeons in the Northwest to implant a mechanical Berlin Heart in a young child. Six weeks later, the physicians successfully performed a heart transplant on the 2-year-old boy. Cardiac surgeon Dr. Thomas Jones also performed breakthrough non-surgical heart valve replacements, using the Melody Heart Valve.
• Under Dr. Sihoun Hahn’s supervision, Children’s will have the largest biochemical genetics program in the nation to provide both clinical and laboratory services. He also worked to help expand newborn screening in Washington state and develop new tests to diagnose more congenital disorders.
• Children’s has the only pediatric anesthesia department in the nation that is training its entire team to perform both routine and advanced pediatric regional anesthesia — a type of nerve block that reduces the need for postoperative narcotics and improves control of postoperative pain and nausea.

Research Highlights:
• Drs. Andrew Scharenberg and David Rawlings are the principal investigators on the largest research grant received by Children’s in its 100-year history. The $23.7 million grant to study gene repair was awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and will support the Northwest Genome Engineering Consortium, led by Children’s in partnership with the University of Washington School of Medicine and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.
• A study led by Dr. Jim Olson showed that tumor paint is 500 times better than a standard MRI at helping surgeons distinguish between cancer cells and normal tissue. Olson and his team developed the paint, which is currently being studied in mice, from a scorpion-derived peptide called chlorotoxin.
• Dr. Dimitri Christakis found that playing with toy blocks may improve language development in young children. In a separate study, Christakis showed that while educational videos may hinder language development in infants, they have no positive or negative effect on the vocabularies of toddlers.
• Dr. David Rawlings identified a connection between allergic diseases and autoimmune diseases. His study implies that allergic and inflammatory diseases may trigger autoimmune diseases by relaxing the controls that normally eliminate newly produced self-reactive B cells.
• Dr. Daniel Rubens found a strong connection between Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) and an abnormality in the inner ear. Rubens’ findings may help doctors identify newborns at risk for SIDS by a simple, affordable and routine hearing test administered shortly after birth.
• Dr. Rita Mangione-Smith learned that children in the United States fail to get recommended health care more than 50% of the time. The study shows that many children are not receiving preventive care basics, such as regular height and weight measurements, nor are they receiving standard care for common ailments, such as asthma and diarrhea.