Great Expectations for New Children's Hospital at Montefiore

By JORDAN MOSS

The new Montefiore Children's Hospital going up on Bainbridge Avenue has more than a few midwives but virtually everyone agrees that Suzanne Pincus was the guiding force behind it. Pincus, a Montefiore board member who died in 1995, was long involved in the Child Life and Patient Education divisions and she became convinced after discussions with medical center officials that a new children's hospital would be the best way to provide better health care to kids and their families. She brought two other board members -- her husband Lionel, a Norwood native, and Martin Davis -- on board for the crusade.

"She was the shining light from the start," said Irwin Redlener, MD, president of the Children's Hospital. "She was the inspiration for the beginning of serious discussions at Montefiore in terms of building a new children's hospital."

"This was truly a case of an individual making things happen," echoed Maurice LaBonne, vice president for Real Estate at Montefiore.

The Pincuses and Davis were so committed to the idea that they donated $500,000 for some initial planning around the concept.

Later, when plans were more concrete, the three donated $20 million to make the plans a reality.

Montefiore doctors and those involved in designing the facility say it will revolutionize the way children and their families move through the sometimes dizzying world of child health care.

The biggest change will not just be under the roof of the new 10-floor building on Bainbridge Avenue, where all the pediatric specialties will come together from their current disparate locations throughout the medical center. But it will also be felt at the more than 30 Montefiore-run community health facilities in the Bronx and lower Westchester, and at the special programs the medical center administers like the Safe House for Lead Poisoning Prevention, the Child Protection Center and its school-based health programs. All of those satellite locations will be linked and networked by computer with each other and the Children's Hospital via the Child Health Network, creating a "seamless ability to connect kids to a whole variety of services," Redlener said.

"Every aspect of children's health care will be incorporated into the Children's Hospital along with its network of community-based programs," Redlener said.

Patient information recorded at one office will be instantaneously available to a doctor at another.

The heightened coordination is meant to simplify administrative procedures and get kids the care they need quicker.

Appointments with specialists or for tests can be set up at any point at which the child enters the system, and the referring doctor will then have instantaneous access to the results of any tests or examinations.

And the Children's Hospital itself will make what is bound to be a scary experience much less so. Not only will the entire decor of the facility be geared towards kids -- with display cases for children's artwork, playrooms and the like -- but the new facility will compress into one building the array of medical services that are currently spread out all over the Medical Center, making it a lot less daunting for an ill child to navigate.

Now, for instance, a child requiring a surgical procedure must take two elevator rides and transverse the hospital for a quarter of a mile, and an X-ray means an elevator ride and a long trip through the medical center.

Through an emphasis on family-centered care, the primary objective of the Children's Hospital will be to add family members to the team of medical specialists. "The better informed the whole family is about a child's medical condition, the better is the [health care] outcome," Redlener said.

To that end, the Children's Hospital will be outfitted with patient rooms that can accommodate a parent who would like to sleep over, and comfortable lounge and kitchen areas. Also, conference rooms for parents to speak in private with doctors will replace the busy hallways that serve that purpose now. And a staffed multimedia center for health information will provide resource materials for parents to learn about how best to care for their children.

Everyone planning the Children's Hospital at Montefiore believes the state-of-the-art facility, which will include a pediatric emergency room and intensive care unit, a center for communication disorders, and a short-stay day hospital, will become a magnet for doctors who are the tops in their fields. "We'll be able to attract the highest quality physicians to come here and work here," said Nat Litman, MD, director of Pediatrics at Montefiore.

The Children's Hospital is being created with the 400,000 children in the Bronx and lower Westchester in mind.

There are two other children's hospitals in the metropolitan region currently in the planning stages -- one in upper Westchester and a renovation of Baby's Hospital in Manhattan -- leading some health care providers to express skepticism about the need for all three. Montefiore doctors are resolute, however, in their belief that the Bronx, larger than most cities with 1.2 million residents, needs its own children's hospital.

"New York City has a significant shortage of health care facilities for children," Redlener said. "We're really just in a catch-up stage."

To illustrate the need, Litman points to another city. "In Philadelphia, there are two children's hospitals for a smaller population of pediatric patients."

Lack of insurance and a shortage of primary care physicians have limited access to health care for Bronx kids, experts say. But now Children's Health Plus, a joint program of the state and federal government, is rapidly insuring children up to the age of 19 not eligible for Medicaid. According to Redlener, 10,000 to 15,000 children a month are joining the ranks of the insured through that program in New York.

But whatever a child's insurance status, the Children's Hospital at Montefiore will take care of them, doctors say. "We have always taken care of kids with Medicaid and children without insurance," Litman says. "That has not been an issue in this hospital for the care of children."

By the early fall of 2001, the Children's Hospital should be ready for its mission, and Montefiore officials have high expectations for its performance.

"This is an enormously important step in our ongoing efforts to improve the quality and accessibility of health care for the children of this region," said Montefiore's president, Spencer Foreman, MD At the groundbreaking last July, which Vice President Al Gore attended. "The Children's Hospital at Montefiore will be a beacon of hope and healing for children and families everywhere."
Ed. note: Mosholu Preservation Corporation, the publisher of the Norwood News, is a not-for- profit affiliate of Montefiore Medical Center.

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