Children’s Health—Education | Minnesota Medical Foundation

Room to learn

2011-09-01T18:53:09Z

Resident education at the former University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital building was top-notch, but as for space dedicated to training, “we had precious little,” says John Andrews, M.D., who directs the Pediatric Residency Program.

Conference rooms were a 10-minute walk away, shared meeting spaces were outdated, and cramped patient rooms made it difficult to conduct rounds.

What a difference a move across the river makes.

“The Amplatz hospital allows us to gather together now near the wards in nice, big, well-lit rooms,” says Miriam Shapiro, M.D., third-year general pediatric resident.

In these meeting rooms, physicians can project presentations and access medical records, making clinical care discussions easier. And because all patient rooms are private and 65 percent larger than rooms in the former location, learning can take place during family-centered rounds at the patient’s bedside as well.

Andrews says philanthropy has been crucial to providing spaces for education at the new hospital.

Heidi Roy Hubbard, M.D., a 1997 alumna of the pediatric residency program, made the lead gift for the new Resident Physician Lounge and Pediatric Education Resource Center. Additional support from countless residency and fellowship program alumni have helped to make this unique space a reality for current and future pediatric residents.

These new spaces, along with the philanthropy-dependent Auditorium, Conference, and Education Center in the new facility’s lobby, will ensure that University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital continues and enhances its century-old legacy of educating tomorrow’s leading pediatricians and physician-scientists.

Additionally, the generosity of Leon Satran, M.D.—who completed his residency and fellowship training at the University and has been on the pediatric faculty here for four decades—and his wife, Alma, helps to ensure that today’s pediatricians-in-training have access to superior educational materials and experiences such as professional research conferences. The Satrans, understanding how difficult it can be to secure funding to support resident education, made an unrestricted gift to the University’s pediatric residency program to be used at the director’s discretion.

“At the University, we have tremendous opportunities for our residents,” says Andrews. “Donors like the Satrans and Dr. Hubbard increase our ability to really give these young doctors the best possible experiences and education.”

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Center of attraction

2011-04-25T21:07:56Z

The new University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital stands out for all the right reasons, but child-centered care tops the list

By Martha Coventry

Dr. Joseph Neglia’s job just got easier. As the Department of Pediatrics head works to recruit topflight experts in children’s health, he can point to the extraordinary new University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital as a very visible symbol of the University’s dedication to children. “Having the Amplatz Children’s Hospital will go a long way to attracting the most talented faculty members and residents,” says Neglia, who also is the hospital’s physician-in-chief. “They will see that the University not only has a verbal commitment to caring for children, but that it, along with Fairview Health Services [which owns the hospital], has also put resources into creating something exceptional.”

Pulling in the best

Pediatric emergency medicine physician Anupam Kharbanda, M.D., who joined the Department of Pediatrics last year, is just the type Neglia wants to attract. Kharbanda grew up in Minneapolis, graduated from Carleton College, and attended medical school at the University of Iowa. While chief resident at New York-Presbyterian Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital- Columbia University, he moved along with the rest of the pediatrics department into a newly built child-dedicated facility where he stayed for five years as an attending physician.

Several years ago, he and his wife thought of returning to Minneapolis to raise their children. Kharbanda was attracted to academic medicine, but he wanted to work in a hospital where every single person was committed to children and adolescents. At the time, the University’s children’s hospital was on the fifth floor of its adult medical center.

“To have a truly child- and adolescentcentered hospital, all of the services — clinical, child-family life, radiology, pharmacy, etc. — have to be aligned toward a common cause and, ideally, under one roof,” he says.

When Kharbanda heard that the University and Fairview were going to build a hospital dedicated to that kind of singular care, he reconsidered.

Building quality from the start

The new hospital rises above the more staid buildings on the West Bank campus of the University of Minnesota Medical Center, Fairview. Already a landmark, its shimmering skin of anodized steel changes color in the light. It stands out. And that’s a good thing. The University and Fairview want the new children’s hospital to be easy to find and easy to get to.

As the signature pediatric hospital of the state’s only academic health center, University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital must play a crucial role in teaching and in conducting research. It must also help the University convey to the public what pediatric research is and how it connects to a child’s care. Aaron Friedman, M.D., vice president for health sciences and dean of the Medical School, believes the hospital’s obvious presence will help build that understanding.

“What the Department of Pediatrics does no longer happens behind the walls of the University, it happens in a very noticeable building that’s part of a neighborhood,” says Friedman, who was in charge of the department until he assumed his new roles in January. “When someone points at the hospital and asks what goes on in there, we hope it will become easier to answer in a way that helps people see how research leads to extraordinary care.”

The best of care for all children

In the century since the University admitted its first pediatric patient in 1911, the Department of Pediatrics has become one of the best in the nation, making discoveries that have changed the face of medicine worldwide. Among its many groundbreaking achievements, the University performed the world’s first successful pediatric bone marrow transplant and open-heart surgery using cross-circulation between a child and parent, as well as Minnesota’s first pediatric living-donor liver transplant and infant heart transplant.

Such breakthroughs are in the works every day both in the hospital and in University labs. For example, by applying research that started in the lab, University doctors recently performed the world’s first stem cell transplant to treat recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, a usually fatal skin disease. Currently, this novel approach is the only viable treatment for children who have this devastating disease.

The University’s children’s hospital has always been the place for kids with the most difficult health issues and it will continue to be. But the new facility cements its role as a full-service children’s hospital that manages the continuum of pediatric illnesses, from tonsillitis to diabetes to rare cancers, with an equally high level of care.

“In order to be the center for training the majority of pediatricians in the state, and to be more accessible to referring physicians, we need to be able to treat common pediatric illnesses as well as the complex,” says Abe Jacob, M.D., director of the Pediatric Hospital Medicine Program.

Doing what’s needed for care and comfort

Some of the sickest children treated at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital must stay in the hospital for weeks or months at a time.

For those families, the hospital room becomes a home away from home. In the former children’s hospital, the rooms were small, they had no comfortable place for parents to sleep, and they were often shared between two patients.

If the new hospital was going to set the standard for familyand child-centered care, that had to change. When it came time to design the rooms for the new hospital, patients, former patients, and their families met with the architects and select physicians and staff.

“We said to the children and their families, ‘Tell us how to build a hospital,’” says Neglia. “Then we just listened and learned.”

Based on their advice and needs, Fairview committed to building large, cheerful rooms, all private, with a wall of windows and space for parents to sleep, store their clothes, work on a computer, and fix and share simple meals. These exceptional rooms are designed to improve outcomes and accelerate healing. Through the Adopt A Room program, individuals and companies can cover the cost of more special features that let patients control many aspects of their rooms and stay connected with school, friends, and family. Other design elements keep disruption of the family and patients to a minimum. The hospital has lounges for parents, family education spaces, and playrooms on nearly every floor.

“It’s really important to have families stay with their children,” says pediatric resident Katie Larson, M.D. “It helps with healing, and parents gain the knowledge and confidence to care for their child when they go home.”

In fact, at University of Minnesota Amplatz Children’s Hospital, parents are considered a crucial part of the care team, and physician rounds literally put them at the center of their children’s care.

“With family-centered rounds, we’ve essentially moved all of our discussions about the child from the conference room to the bedside, with the family present,” says Jacob. “It’s been proven that this type of care improves a family’s experience of the hospital stay and engages families more in the care of their child.”

Family-centered rounds also enrich the learning experience of medical students and residents, as do better, larger education spaces in the new hospital.

An exceptional message

Primary physicians in the community and around the country refer children to the University’s hospital for the treatment of many challenging diseases. According to Jacob, the new hospital’s location, facilities, philosophy, and technology will strengthen that connection.

“We deal with many referring physicians, who care deeply about their patients’ well-being,” says Jacob.

“With the new hospital, we can now assure them of four major things: that their patients and families will have easy access to our facility, that they are getting the most innovative care experience, that the care delivery will be family-centered, and that we will continually communicate with them about their patients.”

Those messages reflect a philosophy Kharbanda endorses and make him happy that he signed on with the University of Minnesota.

“With the Amplatz hospital, there’s the monetary commitment on the part of the University and Fairview, which is crucial, but equally important is their long-term commitment to making everything and everybody child- and family-focused,” he says. “This approach forges a different type of team, a children’s team, and I’m glad to be part of it.”

Martha Coventry is a freelance writer and editor who’s interested in medicine and the natural world.

To find out how you can make every chance possible for a child, please contact the Minnesota Medical Foundation’s Children’s Health Team at 612-626-1931 or childrenshealth@mmf.umn.edu or visit uofmhope.org.

Web extras

Video: Because children deserve every chance

Video: Amplatz Children’s Hospital tour

Companion story

Delivering novel cancer therapies. Read more.

Companion story

Through the emergency department doors. Read more.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

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New fellowship program helps ease shortage of pediatric rheumatologists

2011-04-12T19:09:36Z

More than 6,000 children in Minnesota live with the pain of arthritis and other rheumatic diseases. But the state has only six pediatric rheumatologists to provide specialty care for these young patients.

A nationwide shortage of pediatric rheumatologists prompted the Minneapolis-based Wasie Foundation to take part in a challenge grant: If the University of Minnesota raised half of the $1 million needed to start a pediatric rheumatology fellowship program, The Wasie Foundation would provide the other half.

Now the match is complete, and the fellowship program is in full swing. The program’s first fellow began training in 2009. A second enrolled last summer, and a third will begin this summer.

“Our board … really wanted to see the program get going,” says Jan Preble, The Wasie Foundation’s vice president of programs. “Mostly we’re just grateful that there will be more people in practice to serve the children in need.”

The three-year fellowship includes one year of clinical training and two years devoted to research.

“We hope that by training more pediatric rheumatologists for the region, we will help to ensure that children with rheumatic diseases have timely access to the subspecialty physicians they need,” says pediatric rheumatologist and fellowship program coleader Bryce Binstadt, M.D., Ph.D.

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Remembered forever

2010-11-30T18:29:07Z

Fund named in son’s memory supports educational opportunities for pediatric critical care fellows

Christopher Meyer, M.D., loved her career as a pediatric critical care doctor at Gillette Children’s Specialty Healthcare. It was an intense job that required her to be on her feet all day, but she was continually amazed at the strength of the families she met.

But a childhood spine condition made it difficult and often painful for Meyer to stand for hours on end. She had several surgeries, trying to alleviate the pain, and each had a rather long recovery period when she couldn’t work at all.

Meyer worried that she was burdening her colleagues at the University, with which Gillette was then affiliated. “But they never, ever made it seem that they were resentful at all,” she says. “They were very compassionate and understanding.”

In gratitude for that understanding, Meyer in 1999 made a gift of $27,000 to help trainees in the University’s pediatric critical care fellowship program attend professional conferences or to support their research. Meyer completed her pediatric critical care fellowship training at the University in 1992.

“Some of the leaders in the international community have trained here,” says fellowship program director Marie Steiner, M.D.

“There’s a long history of training the movers and the shakers—in terms of research, education, and service.”

Though Meyer’s back problems forced her to retire early, in 2003, she firmly believes in the power of research and education.

Then four years ago, her middle son, Erik Nichols, died suddenly at age 23. In his honor, Meyer recently renamed the fund she had created the Erik David Nichols Memorial Pediatric Critical Care Fellows Fund. She also has added to the fund, which now contains more than $37,000, and she made it an endowment so it could be a funding source for fellows in perpetuity.

“That way [Erik] could be remembered forever,” Meyer says.

The support her funds provide to fellows will have a lasting impact as well. The fund allows them to attend professional meetings and educational conferences that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford on their trainees’ salaries, Steiner says.

For instance, if a fellow is chosen to present at a professional meeting, he or she will attend that conference, although it may not be the most beneficial educationally, Steiner says. But the Erik David Nichols Memorial Pediatric Critical Care Fellows Fund allows fellows, today and in the future, additional opportunities for professional development.

“It’s so selfless,” Steiner says.

For more information on supporting fellowship funds, contact Courtney Billing at 612-626-1931 or c.billing@mmf.umn.edu.

You can make a difference

Help the University of Minnesota save lives, inspire hope, and prepare the world’s future health care leaders. Make a gift today.

Because with your support, anything is possible.