Children's Hospital Boston is a 397-bed comprehensive center for pediatric health care. As one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States, Children's offers a complete range of health care services for children from birth through 21 years of age. (Our Advanced Fetal Care Center can begin interventions at 15 weeks gestation and we treat adults in special situations.)

In an average year, Children's records approximately 17,000 inpatient admissions and more than 475,000 ambulatory visits, and performs more than 23,000 surgical procedures and over 188,000 radiological examinations.

Children’s is the primary pediatric teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, where most of our physicians hold faculty appointments. The clinical staff includes approximately 932 attending physicians and dentists, 775 residents and fellows, 1,148 nursing staff, over 4,613 other full- and part-time staff and 471 active volunteers.

Among the hospital’s many features are a Level IV Newborn Intensive Care Unit, a Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplantation Unit, a Neuroscience Unit, a Level I Pediatric Trauma Center and a national Center-of-Excellence, the Cardiovascular Program. 

Last summer, Children’s opened a new clinical building, which added 50 medical and surgical beds and increased the size of our Medical/Surgical Intensive Care Unit and Cardiac ICU. The new building added a new ambulatory surgery suite with 8 operating rooms and expand our overall diagnostic capabilities including adding a second Cardiac MRI.

Most in-patient rooms include accommodations for a parent to stay overnight, have wireless Internet access, and all floors have lounges and activity areas for patients and families

In addition to its many inpatient services, Children’s operates more than 160 ambulatory programs, ranging from general pediatrics to subspecialty programs. Key clinical programs and facilities include the Advanced Fetal Care Center, the Vascular Anomalies Center, a Communication Enhancement Center and the Developmental Medicine Center. Children’s is also an active participant in a number of cooperative programs, including the Boston Center for Heart Transplantation and the Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Care Program, a collaborative program in pediatric oncology with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Directly supporting Children’s patient care is research conducted in the John F. Enders Pediatric Research Laboratories and the Karp Family Research Laboratories. Hundreds of laboratory researchers and physician investigators conduct projects ranging from basic biomedical research to clinical applications of new medications, technologies and surgical procedures. Children’s researchers have been recognized the world over, and include a Nobel Laureate, nine National Academy of Science members, twelve National Institute of Medicine members and ten Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.

Breakthroughs

Children’s Hospital Boston has been a leader in child health for more than 130 years. Below are some of the Firsts at Children’s.

2000s

2006: Dr. Michael Greenberg and colleagues demonstrate that newly-recognized genetic elements called microRNAs, which suppress gene activity, have a role in the developing nervous system. They show that one microRNA fine-tunes the development of synapses, the points of communication between brain cells that underlie learning and memory.
2006: Drs. Dale Umetsu, Omid Akbari and colleagues report that a newly recognized type of immune cell, NKT, may play an important role in causing asthma, even in the absence of conventional T-helper cells. Moreover, NKT cells respond to a different class of antigens than are currently recognized to trigger asthma.
2006: Dr. Larry Benowitz and colleagues discover a naturally occurring growth factor called oncomodulin that stimulates regeneration in injured optic nerves, raising the possibility of treating blindness due to optic-nerve damage and the hope of achieving similar regeneration in the spinal cord and brain.
2005: Dr. Stephen Harrison and colleagues show how a key part of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) changes shape, triggering other changes that allow the AIDS virus to enter and infect cells. The findings offer clues that could lead to new vaccine and treatment approaches.
2005: In the best-documented effort to date, Dr. Felix Engel, PhD, and Mark Keating, MD, successfully get adult heart-muscle cells to divide and multiply in mammals, the first step in regenerating heart tissue. They are now investigating whether their technique can improve heart function in animal models of cardiac injury.
2004: Children's surgeons perform New England's first multivisceral organ transplant when 11-month-old Abdullah Alazemi receives a stomach, pancreas, liver and small intestine from a single donor.
2004: Drs. Marsha Moses, Roopali Roy and colleagues show that an enzyme called ADAM 12, when found in urine, is a reliable indicator of the presence of breast cancer. Such "biomarkers" may indicate that a dormant, harmless tumor is about to begin growing and spreading, and could be used for screening patients and for guiding therapy.
2003: Drs. Heung Bae Kim and Tom Jaksic develop, test and successfully perform the world's first-ever serial transverse enteroplasty (STEP) procedure, a potential lifesaver for patients with short bowel syndrome.
2003: Dr. George Daley and colleagues report creating a continuously growing line of embryonic germ cells, primitive cells that mature to become sperm or eggs. They also created male reproductive cells capable of fertilizing an egg to form an early embryo. These achievements may lead to a better understanding how reproductive cells form, and ways of 'reprogramming' specialized cells to become more like embryonic stem cells.
2002: Children's Hospital Boston is recongized by the National Association of Children's Hospitals and the American Academy of Pediatrics as a national model in terrorism preparedness.
2002: Drs. Scott Pomeroy and Todd Golub use microarray gene expression profiling to identify different types of brain tumors and predict clinical outcome. This allows radiation and chemotherapy to be tailored to kill cancer cells while leaving healthy tissue alone.
2002: Dr. Nader Rifai co-authors a landmark study showing that a simple and inexpensive blood test for C-reactive protein, a substance produced in the liver when arteries become inflamed, is a more powerful predictor of a person's risk of heart attack or stroke than LDL cholesterol.
2002: Children's Vascular Anomalies Center, led by Drs. Judah Folkman and John Mulliken, conducts the first clinical trial of Marimastat, a new angiogenisis inhibitor, for children with advanced vascular anomalies.
2001: Children's clinicians lead the first comprehensive study of medication errors in a pediatric hospital. THe study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
2001: Children's performs the world's first successful fetal repair of hypoplastic left heart syndrome (HLHS) in a 19-week-old fetus. Children's cardiologists threaded a dardiac catheter through the fetus's atrial valve and inflated a balloon to widen the opening.
2000: Dr. Frederick Alt finds that end-joining proteins maintain the stability of DNA, helping to prevent the kinds of chromosomal changes that precede cancer.