Children’s Medical Center Dallas traces its roots back to the summer of 1913, when a group of nurses organized an open-air clinic for infants. The clinic eventually grew to form Children’s Medical Center Dallas. Today, Children’s is a private, not-for-profit hospital, with 406 licensed inpatient beds and more than 50 outpatient specialty centers that deals with a variety of diseases and disorders among children.

Children's is expanding to meet the demands of the pediatric population of Texas that continues to grow. Currently, Children's admits more than 20,000 patients each year and conducts more than 300,000 outpatient visits annually.

Children’s is the primary pediatric teaching facility for The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, one of the nation’s leading academic medical and research institutions. This affiliation gives Children’s access to the most advanced medical research and treatments.

More than 800 physicians comprise the medical staff at Children’s, and the hospital has more than 4,100 employees. Children’s is the largest employer of pediatric nurse practitioners in Texas and one of the largest in the nation, Approximately 600 volunteers and 32 outreach groups donate more than 100,000 hours each year, equalling an estimated $1.8 million in wages.

Children’s is in midst of an ambitious facilities expansion to be complete by 2008. This includes doubling the number of beds, increasing general floor space by almost a million square feet, opening 12 new state-of-the-art operating rooms and providing more than 100 pediatric ICU beds. The community has shown tremendous support of Children’s and its growing needs. The $150 million wePromise for Children's Medical Center fund-raising campaign began in 2003, and exceeded its goal a year ahead of schedule, raising more than $160 million.

Children's Medical Center Legacy

Children's broke ground on a new hospital, Children's Medical Center Legacy, in September 2005 to accommodate the pediatric growth in the northern counties of North Texas. Children's Medical Center Legacy, located in Plano, TX, will feature 60 medical/surgical beds, 12 pediatric ICU beds, four operating rooms, full-service diagnostics and an urgent/emergency care center when it opens in 2008.

Children's opened the Ambulatory Care Pavilion in Legacy in April 2006 across the street from the main Children's Legacy site to provide multi-specialty outpatient services in a number of key service areas while construction on the Legacy main hospital continues.

Dallas campus expansion

With the purchase by Children's in December 2005 of the former Menswear Mart in Dallas, now called the Children's Pavilion, Children's owns 400,000 square feet of space and more than 14 acres of land across the street from the main campus. Once completed in January 2007, the remodeled Children's Pavilion will allow most of the hospital's outpatient services to operate in one location.

Construction will commence in fall 2006 on a new third tower located on the main hospital campus. When completed in 2008, the eight-story tower will create a new front door for Children's while creating space for additional critical care beds and new recovery, pharmacy and dining areas.

Breakthroughs

In February of 2005, Children’s was the state’s first pediatric hospital accredited as a Level I Trauma Center. Children’s is one of only 14 pediatric facilities in the United States and the only one in the Southeast.

Children's offers the only comprehensive intestinal rehabilitation and transplant program in the Southwest capable of providing all possible treatment options for intestinal failure. In 2005, the program at Children's received approval to perform intestinal transplants from the United Network of Organ Sharing.

In 2003, five neurosurgeons on the Children's medical staff performed the landmark separation surgery of craniopagus conjoined twins Ahmed and Mohamed Ibrahim at Children’s. This extremely rare condition required a 34-hour surgery to successfully separate the twins. Today, the twins, who have returned to their home country of Egypt, are walking and talking and are progressing well.

The Children’s mission to “Make Life Better for Children” has inspired the invention of many new programs and treatments. They include:

The Asthma Management program at Children’s was one of the first in the nation to receive certification by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations for Disease-Specific Care Programs for pediatric asthma initiatives.

The sickle cell disease program at Children’s is one of the nation’s largest pediatric programs. It is a key component of the Southwestern Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center, one of 10 National Institutes of Health-funded centers in the United States. Hematologists on the medical staff have spearheaded the development of a comprehensive set of diagnostic and management guidelines for children with sickle cell disease that have been endorsed by the Texas Department of State Health Service.

Children's ranks third out of 231 institutions in the number of open therapeutic studies for cancer patients and fourth in the total number of all open studies available through the national Children's Oncology Group. The hospital ranks ninth in the total children enrolled in these COG-sponsored therapeutic programs. Children's also is one of only 20 institutions authorized by the National Caner Institute to conduct experimental Phase I studies, which explore the value of newly discovered agents as potential treatments.

The Children’s “After the Cancer Experience” (ACE) is a comprehensive survivor program and the only one participating in the NCI-funded Childhood Cancer Survivor Study. The expertise of ACE team members has been requested locally, nationally and internationally by others attempting to model our program and services.

The Children’s pediatric ICU pioneered the nurse practitioner program. We have the largest pediatric intensive care unit in the nation with a total of 63 beds.

The Dallas Cystic Fibrosis Care and Teaching Center at Children’s is one of the largest in the nationand is an accredited “Center of Excellence” by the U.S. Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

Children’s introduced the nation’s first pediatric, hospital-based day-surgery program in 1968.

The hemophilia program at Children’s is an internationally know research leader in this area.

The infectious disease physicians on the medical staff at Children’s are among the most respected specialists in the country. The medical staff’s handbook on dosing of antimicrobial agents in pediatrics is distributed widely throughout the U.S. and internationally. The handbook was written in 1975 and is updated every two years. Dr. George McCracken, chief of Infectious Diseases at Children's, serves as the editor of the Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal, the official publication of the Pediatric Infectious Diseases Society and the European Society for Paediatric Infectious Diseases.

Children’s has a nationally-renowned pediatric regional air- and ground-transport services team that transports more than 2,000 children each year. We were the first pediatric transport service in the country to be CAMTS accredited in all three transport modes, ground, helicopter and fixed wing. 

The Clinical Pastoral Education Program at Children’s is accredited by the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, Inc. Clergy of all faiths and from around the country choose Children’s for their training. Our program received recommendations for three commendations to the National Accreditation Committee following a recent 10-year re-accreditation survey.

The Department of Pharmacy leads the nation in the development, application and utilization of technology and automatic resources to provide the best and safest care to our patients and their families. The IV robot in Pharmacy can prepare 60 to 300 syringe-based dosage units per hour. Children’s is the first hospital in the country to implement the system.