Elevating the Level of Pediatric Health Care

Your generosity allows for continuous surgical advancements for our children.

Each year, more than 5,000 children seek healing and hope at The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio through life-changing surgeries for congenital conditions, illnesses, diseases, and injuries. As the only academic, freestanding children’s hospital in the San Antonio region, The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio offers comprehensive teams of specialists who continuously work to enhance and improve pediatric services in our community, bringing their individual skills and expertise together to create the best possible outcomes.

“The ultimate goal of the department of surgery is that no child in San Antonio should ever have to leave the city to obtain the best, most advanced care, regardless of the illness or injury,” said Dr. Katherine Barsness, chair, pediatric surgery at The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio. “We are building the department through interdisciplinary program growth, bringing a variety of clinicians together to be involved in our complex child care team.”

The interdisciplinary, comprehensive care provided at The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio enables the child and their parents to see all of the specialists they need in just one visit, at the same time. Specialists are able to bring their collective skills and experience together, collaborate, and put forth the best care plan for each individual child.

“San Antonio does not currently have a large number of interdisciplinary programs,” Dr. Barsness added. “Our mission is to build a single center of expertise for comprehensive care. Every child in San Antonio deserves a hospital that is 100 percent devoted to their needs.”

Building a department of surgery is not a single endeavor. It means bringing along all of the additional specialists and sub-specialists necessary to support each case or diagnosis.

“From the moment a patient steps inside our doors, the number of visits they have with different departments and specialists throughout the hospital is significant,” said Dr. Barsness. “Our goal is to completely surround the families with services to meet all of their needs – body, mind, and spirit. We have additional services, like Marcus, our therapy dog, who can give patients some puppy cuddles to help lessen feelings of fear or anxiety. To give patients some sense of control, we allow them to pick out a motorized toy vehicle, and they can drive themselves into surgery. These little details, on top of our incredible mission to extend the healing ministry of Jesus Christ, help us elevate the level of care we provide.”

Surgeons at The Children’s Hospital are continuously innovating new and different ways to minimize the impact of surgery on patients, working hard to build a minimally invasive surgery program.

“With advancements in technology, the opportunities are there, and we are ready to embrace these new technologies with the appropriate support,” Dr. Barsness said. “We are not only ready to embrace these advancements, but we are willing to be a leader in the care of children using advanced technologies. We also bring with us the high standards of Baylor College of Medicine and have the full support of the university as academic surgeons to help develop our academics and ensure we are always at the forefront of medicine.”

As the number of children in our region continues to grow, adding permanent surgical positions and expanding the pediatric surgical program is important to The Children’s Hospital’s continued service to children and their families.

“As a full-service, academic children’s hospital, it’s critical that we provide a full scope of clinical programs for the patients we are privileged to serve throughout our region and beyond. This includes planning and investing in programs that simply aren’t offered by any other providers in our region,” added Dr. Norman Christopher, chief medical officer at The Children’s Hospital. “Our community deserves the very best, and we need to provide that service right here, where our patients live every day.”

“We understand having a child in the hospital is incredibly scary for parents; most times, it’s the first time they have no control over what happens to their child and that’s frightening,” Dr. Barsness said. “We are always looking to do things bigger, better, best, at The Children’s Hospital of San Antonio, because our patients deserve it. We will never put our patients on a journey to health on their own, we will walk with them.”