Newborn Medicine

Samantha’s story

When our daughter Samantha was born six weeks premature, she had a host of medical problems. When the NICU where she was cared for since birth said there was nothing more that they could do for her, and that she would probably not make the year we were devastated. We wanted so much for her to be healthy and come home, but 20 to 30 daily spontaneous desaturation episodes (blue spells) meant that she could not.

Desperate for a second opinion, we contacted Boston Children's Hospital...[more]

At Children’s Hospital Boston, we aim to solve some of the world’s greatest pediatric health problems. Some ways we do this stem from scientific research: Understanding diseases deeply—even at the cellular or molecular level—leads to new drugs and therapies. Other discoveries arise from moments spent at patients’ bedsides, when doctors and nurses see opportunities to improve care. This approach, which we call “clinical innovations,” often requires us to develop entirely new tools or come up with inventive strategies. This creative form of innovation is the path by which many major improvements in health care have been made.

At Children’s Hospital Boston, we believe that patients and families deserve to know whether the hospital where they have chosen to receive their care meets the highest standards and is committed to excellence.  Through our Program for Patient Safety and Quality, we continually monitor and improve the care we provide to our patients. Since the diseases and chronic conditions that affect children and adolescents are quite different from those of adults, it is often not appropriate to use adult measures to evaluate the quality of pediatric care.  That’s why we have taken a leadership role in developing scientifically sound methods to measure the quality of care provided to all children and adolescents.