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From
the physician-in-chief
Progress continues on our expansion into OB
and West Houston; NIH grant rankings announced
By Ralph D. Feigin, M.D.
Texas Children’s Hospital has
continued to work over the summer months toward establishment of
an obstetrics service. On July 14, 2006, Texas Children’s and
St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital signed a letter of intent and
agreed to the phased acquisition of the St. Luke’s Obstetrical
Service by Texas Children’s. During the next few months, a
management agreement will be established that will permit St.
Luke’s obstetrical employees to become Texas Children’s
employees and for Texas Children’s to operate the existing St.
Luke’s Obstetrical Service in place, until such time as a new
maternity facility is constructed by Texas Children’s.
We are in the process of
planning a facility that will be on the west side of Fannin,
joined to the West Tower by a two-level bridge. The building
will include complete obstetrical services for the mother and
routine newborn beds, as well as Levels 2 and 3 beds for the
children who are born here. Four
levels of underground parking with 1,200 parking spaces will be
placed beneath the new structure, which is expected to occupy
approximately 500,000 square feet of space. The new facility
will provide office space for both the full-time Department of
Obstetrics and Gynecology at Baylor College of Medicine and
community-based obstetricians. The scheduled completion date for
the new building is 2010.
Inpatient facility is in the works for
West Houston
Plans to develop a facility in West Houston also are under way.
The hospital is preparing to construct several buildings on a
56-acre piece of property on the corner of Interstate 10 and
Barker-Cypress Road. The west campus expansion, in its initial
phases, will include an inpatient pediatric facility of
approximately 100 beds and operating rooms,
emergency room services, an ambulatory care center, a central
physical plant and a physician office building. Some of these
will be completed in 2009 with the complete Phase 1
construction concluded by 2010.
NIH gives 99 grant awards exceeding $40
million to Baylor/Texas Children’s
It also is a pleasure to announce that the National Institutes
of Health (NIH) awards rankings for 2005 for every U.S. medical
school and every department became available this past week. We
congratulate everyone at Texas Children’s for their spectacular
performance. The Department of Pediatrics of Baylor College of
Medicine at Texas Children’s once again ranked first among all
U.S. medical school pediatric departments with total extramural
funding of more than $40 million in 2005.
Of equal importance is that
this represents 99 individual grant awards, of which 87 were
research grants and the remaining were training grants or
fellowship awards. This exceeds by more than 25 the number of
grants received by any other department of pediatrics in the
U.S. This amount of funding also exceeded by almost $15 million
the second ranked department and was 100 percent greater than
the amount received by the 10th ranking department. There are
125 U.S. medical schools, and 25 percent of this number received
no NIH grant support. Only 24 of the 125 pediatric departments
in the U.S. medical schools had in excess of $10 million of NIH
grant support for 2005.
The medical school pediatric
department in the state of Texas with the second greatest amount
of NIH support was the University of Texas, Dallas Southwestern
Medical School at $10 million, ranking it 24th among all U.S.
medical school pediatric departments. Other medical school
pediatric departments that followed Baylor in the top 10
included the University of Colorado, Yale University, Stanford
University, Vanderbilt University, University of Alabama,
Washington University, University of California, Los Angeles
and Johns Hopkins.
Kudos to the medical staff
It is a pleasure to continue to be able to report on the
outstanding successes achieved by all of our medical staff
physicians. Every year, each person contributes in their own
unique way to ensuring that Texas Children’s Hospital can offer
the finest possible patient care, educational programs and
research advances to children of the Houston community, the
state of Texas, and the nation.
Thank you for all that you do
for children everywhere and for your support of this
institution.
Ralph D. Feigin, M.D., is physician-in-chief at Texas
Children’s Hospital and professor and chairman of the Department
of Pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine.
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