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(Dr. Anthony Pearson-Shaver) Macon is actually an excellent location for Health Care in as much as we're centralized. And for a tertiary care facility like we are, it provides us the ability to be able to service a larger region and population of patients. The Children's Hospital, Navicent Health is a 106-bed hospital and we see about 42,000 patients a year. That includes inpatient as well as outpatient services. We provide about 90% of the care that can be provided to any group of children. We are a tertiary care hospital, which means we can take care of patients that require specialty care that don't necessarily require quaternary care like you find in Atlanta or Augusta.
When pediatric care is mixed with adult care, sometimes people make the mistake of thinking that, well, I can just do the same thing I do for an adult, but smaller'. It's important to understand that children change from the time they're born until they reach adulthood. So, a children's hospital concentrates specialists who understand children and understand children's healthcare and children's development in one place so that all of that expertise can be brought to bare to improve the outcomes for those children.
We are the only children's hospital between Atlanta and Florida. What every child needs is a facility that is kid friendly, that can provide the care that they need and that their families need locally.
(Jena Jones, RN) What I feel that sets the children's hospital apart from other children's hospitals is really that we're blessed to be kinda small. We have that really family centered environment. A lot of our kids come and go, they come back and see us, they've been here before. I think not only did it attract me as a registered nurse to be in that environment, but it brings a lot of our families back to see us.
(Dr Andy Bozeman, Pediatric Surgeon) I think that its important to be able to offer pediatric surgical services here in central Georgia. We take care of babies all the way up to, you know, adolescence. I think that we're able to offer that as a comprehensive approach here. We collaborate with multiple subspecialist at this hospital, and we're able to offer first class care.
(Dr Josh Glenn, Pediatric Surgeon) Recently we've introduced robotic surgery here so we're the first center in the state of Georgia to do robotic general pediatric surgery. And there's only about thirteen centers in the nation that are doing it, and we're ne of them. Its like taking the advanced laparoscopic surgery that we already do to the next level. I think we're really trying to lead the way in children's care.
(Dr Andy Bozeman, Pediatric Surgeon) Georgia is still very much a rural state, and our service area that we provide pediatric services to, it covers a lot of terrain, a lot of geography here in central Georgia and all the way to the Florida line.
(Teen girl) I have a disease called Achalasia. My esophagus was closed up at the bottom. I had no muscle function at all. So, what they had to do was cut the muscle to allow food or liquids to pass through. Since I was able to receive the robotic surgery, my recovery was much faster.
( Dr Eric Lincoln, Pediatric Orthopedic Surgeon) We have been using a robotic system for spin surgery called Mazor which increases the accuracy of replacing difficult hardware for kids that the difference is that with Scoliosis surgery sometimes the anatomy is very, umm, distorted because of the Scoliosis. And the robotic equipment helps with the accuracy and the safety of the patient.
Pediatric Orthopedics is very all encompassing in that there's simple broken bones and infections, but it also covers many other areas of Orthopedics including spin, hand deformities, sports medicine, and having somebody who's been specially trained in Pediatric Orthopedics who can kind of cover all of the different areas I think is a huge benefit. Additionally, with things like broken bones, kids are very different than adults in that they have open growth plates and so the treatments are usually done differently than how they would be done to treat an adult. Treating pediatric patients is not always just treating the patients. It's also treating the families and parents and everyone else involved.
(Kristin Sarri, CCLS, Certified Child Life Specialist) A lot of our kids are very anxious about being in the hospital. And when you think of having some medical procedure done to you, they think it's gonna hurt, or they feel like they're being punished because it hurts when it's done. And they don't understand that it may hurt for a little bit but it's what makes them better and what makes them be able to go home faster and get healthier. So, explaining any procedure to them beforehand clears a lot of misconceptions about why they're in the hospital and what's gonna happen to them, and it reduces anxiety. It actually puts a lot of the parents at ease. Sometimes more so than the children. Some of the distractions we use are iPads, books, different toys, sometimes we use guided imagery, relaxation, different things to kinda keep their focus on us and not what the doctor or the nurse is doing.
(Teen boy) I have a great time here at the Children's Hospital. The best part is the love I get from, umm, the staff members and stuff like that, and help me out when I be down because I get a lot of surgeries, I have to get another surgery done. So I feel like we're a family.
(Dr Mitch Rodriquez, Medical Director, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) The nursey, the NICU as we refer to it, is a 42-bed intensive care nursery that serves as a regional center for the state of Georgia. As a level 3 center, our focus is essentially stabilizing neonates and providing them with an opportunity to survive the process of prematurity, surgical interventions and other problems that they may encounter as a result of complications during the pregnancy.
(Memory Garcia, RN, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) We get to work with these miracle babies and to see them grow and to be a part of that process and they are just a joy to take care of. It's just a really wonderful, because you don't just really take care of the baby, you take care of the family. And, to be a part of that is really a blessing.
(Dr Mitch Rodriquez, Medical Director, Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) The critical care component of what we do in the Children's Hospital is pretty much the defining practice of what we do. As a result of our delivery service, the specialists we have in-house that provide us with the opportunity to take care of these babies and pediatric patients because not only do we have a neonatal intensive care unit, but we also have a pediatric intensive care unit. It offers the community that bridge to specialized care that otherwise would be lost and would require further traveling times for these families to reach and achieve.
(Ambulance driver) Since 1996 we've traveled over a million miles picking up children and infants from rural hospitals back to the Children's Hospital. These ambulances are designed for critical care. The nurses and therapists are able to stay in constant contact with their physicians and perform different procedures and basic maneuvers in the back of these units while we're transporting them.
(Parent of a small boy named Jacob) Immediately when we walked in the door at the Children's Hospital, of course we were overwhelmed wit everything. Jacob had been in the hospital before here and Warner Robins, but it never escalated to the point of having to go anywhere where a specialist was concerned. Dr Delocruze and Dr Clark, in very short order, explained to us, this is what we need to do and we need to do it now. When they checked Jacobs eyes they had noticed that he had huge dilatation in his eyes. We quickly began to realize and found out after they did a CT scan that his brain had started to swell. The radiologist who told us that, umm, between the doctor and him, that there was about a 5% chance that Jacob would make it. And we truly believe that God healed Jacob, but we also believe that God put doctors in our paths that had the ability to do it. And those doctors are at the Children's Hospital in Macon. They answered every question that we had. They sat and talked to us. They laughed with us if we needed to laugh. They cried with us if we needed to cry. Emotionally they were connected with us. I don't know that all hospital do that. I think that a lot of times there tries to be a disconnect because you don't want to get too connected to the patient or their family and we did not feel like that at The Children's Hospital.
For almost 30 years, Beverly Knight Olson Children's Hospital Navicent Health has been the provided the highest quality, personalized, child-friendly pediatric care in our region. As the only dedicated children's facility between Atlanta, Georgia and Gainesville, Florida, we serve a primary area of 29 counties, and offer unique services such as: