My son was born with a congenital heart defect.
My wife and I had no idea that anything was wrong before he was born. In the operating room (he was breech, so she had a C-section) everything was going according to plan, right up to the point that he took his first breath.
If you're not aware, kids come out looking purple and wrinkly, but start turning pink as their lungs fill with air. My son went the other way, getting darker instead.
He was immediately rushed into Intensive Care. Rather than getting to hold him, my wife got to see him briefly before he was taken away. Very briefly. The quick-thinking anesthesiologist gave her a sedative and she felt no pain for a while.
There was too much fog for the helicopter to fly him to MUSC Children's Hospital, so a special ambulance was sent. It was my first taste of specialized children's medicine.
The ambulance that arrived a few hours after he was born was amazing. It contained, in the back of a truck, an entire working hospital in miniature. On the side was a door which opened, and a lift that dropped to the ground, sized to fit a pediatric bed. In place of a bed was a self-contained Intensive Care incubator which the driver unplugged and brought up to the ICU. For all intents and purposes, our son never left the hospital - the ICU moved with him down the hall, down the elevator, out the door, down the sidewalk, into the truck, and down the interstate to MUSC. He was constantly monitored by a physician trained in pediatric cardiac issues.
At the hospital, he was taken into an even more sophisticated ICU which was geared and set up specifically to deal with pediatric cardiac patients. That's all the unit dealt with, and the people staffing it were experts in their field.
A few days later, he had a massive surgery. He was cut open from just below the base of his neck to just above his navel. His sternum was split, his ribs spread, and his heart laid bare. The surgeon and his team removed, replaced, and re-routed major blood vessels to correct the bloodflow to his lungs, and looked inside his heart to see if it was possible to correct the underlying defect. It wasn't at the time because he was so small.
That work was done on a heart the size of a walnut.
That's the first reason. By having hospitals dedicated to children, you are able to gather experts in the field, and provide a level of technical expertise that would be impossible to achieve otherwise. Because, while the hearts of adults and children are structurally similar, there is a much different skillset involved when the heart that you're working on (and in) is smaller than your thumb.
This heart is from a child over a year old. Imagine how much smaller my son's was at only five days:
Once my wife was able to join us at the hospital (she had to stay behind to recover from her C-section) we noticed another thing - the hospital staff were all used to dealing with not only their patients, but their patients' parents. Because the staff work exclusively with children, their ways of approaching almost everything are geared toward making things understandable and as comfortable as possible for the kids and their families. It may seem like a small thing, but focusing on children only, allows you to better serve the kids and their families.Imagine how terrifying it is to be in the hospital, then try to add on to that the confusion of being thrown into an 'adult' world as a child. A children's hospital makes things just that little bit better.
We've been back to that hospital several times. At just under a year old, my son was opened up again. This time the surgeon opened his heart as well, and did some remodeling work on the inside. At that point, it was about the size of the heart in that picture up there. Once he was out of ICU, we were told that when he felt better, he could go play in the Atrium:
That's a clean, indoor playground specifically for patients at the children's hospital. It's easy to tell an adult that they have to get up and move around in order to get better, but that logic doesn't work on a scared, hurting child. Telling them that they can go play though? That has an effect. He didn't fully understand it at first, but once we had him down there, and he saw the toys and the other kids playing, he got the picture pretty quickly. Before you knew it there were plastic trucks whizzing along the floor.
When he went back last year, his room (after ICU) was that one in the upper left corner of the picture. He couldn't see the atrium while he was lying in his bed, but if he sat up, he could. That's incentive. Even then, he could only see a little of it from the bed. If he got up and walked to the window, he could see the whole thing. Once he proved he could sit up for long enough in the chair, he could go down in his wheelchair. Once he was down there, he of course wanted to get up and play.
And that's the biggest thing: a children's hospital provides a good atmosphere for recovery. Being around other kids who are also going through tough times, and having the ability to just BE a kid, is worth its weight in gold.
Written by,
Courtney Ballard
https://www.quora.com/profile/Courtney-Ballard-2?ch=10&share=46d35429&srid=CId2
Link to original content:
https://www.quora.com/Why-are-there-separate-hospitals-for-children/answer/Courtney-Ballard-2?ch=10&share=c8c2b383&srid=CId2
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