Hi there friends! Welcome back to For the Littlest in all of its total nerdy glory! I’m officially back in action because guess what… I FINISHED THE BIG ONE! Yep, that’s right – the biggest database to date is sitting complete right in front of me, bringing me to tears in Chestnut Coffee House, which has honestly been my home office as of late.
For a second, before I share the big big data, I want to take a step back and reflect on the year I spent working on this project. I realize that in that time I haven’t been on the blog much at all, which feels so odd because it used to be the heart and soul of me, but I took this break because I made a promise to myself. The promise was that I would come back here when I had started learning what I truly wanted to know: how people across the country can better know and serve child health. After all of this searching at the bottom of an iced latte, I’ve found that I fulfilled my promise: I’ve only started to learn.
So, without any conclusions or big ideas on how to change the world, I come to this keyboard with one true thing that I learned making this: gratitude. For example, there may not be an Intestinal transplant program near me, but someone somewhere in Ohio, Nebraska, or Massachusetts, to name a few of many, is using their gift to make miracles of modern science, like these transplants, happen. And you know what? Some of these places are prepared to take one of my kiddos in SC to wherever their doctors are to give the gift of life. That is the coolest thing EVER. That someone somewhere has passion enough to dedicate themselves to obscure and rare diseases, to become a specialist in their field, is so cool and so undoubtedly God-given.
So, the fruit of my labor from December 12, 2021 to today, in all of its color coded majesty, wrapped so tightly in my gratitude and wonder at the gifts given to God’s people, I present to you.
Map of facilities meeting criteria: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1_Z9mKHiFtppAVA8OSJ4Ei4P440nId6k&usp=sharing
Spreadsheet including all data: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vShFyioRZBVFHBplJ8tFfMB8RFFcPpaBRNt0a6d9zJaUoehDUFnZsTKpf2WHsXnBsx1VHfBKV4YcHrt/pubhtml
Here are the statistics, in summary!
- Total Facilities Investigated: 6,463
- Total Facilities Meeting Criteria for Inclusion: 1,715
- Inpatient Pediatric Medical Care Providers: 782
- Neonatal Intensive Care Only: 322
- Inpatient Pediatric/Adolescent Behavioral Health Only: 413
- Pediatric Emergency Medicine Only, No Inpatient: 58
- Combination of Care Provided that Does NOT Include Inpatient Medical Pediatrics: 33
- Pediatric Specialty Care Facilities: 107
- Included: 50 States plus the District of Columbia
Also beneficial to understanding the data, here are some notes regarding this project’s margin of error:
- The data compounded in this project was collected from individual hospital websites. Some hospitals and hospital conglomerates had websites that were more difficult to navigate due to their lack of specific data (ex. Bon Secours Mercy Health). Due to this difficulty and my desire to keep implication data to a minimum, some of these hospitals may be improperly included or not included in this project.
- Pediatric emergency care was hard to qualify, and my decision to include specific pediatric emergency capable facilities was based on their own admission of preparedness. Some states had regulated pediatric trauma and emergency systems, others did not. If a facility detailed itself as having a dedicated pediatric emergency staff, I included it. For example, the state of California, especially in Los Angeles County, has a distinction of an EDAP – an emergency department approved for pediatrics. Although there is not an equivalent nationwide, the fact that there was a specialized qualification in the state itself was enough for inclusion.
- This data does not discount the smaller community hospitals and rural access hospitals that can provide pediatric observation care on their adult medical-surgical units. I acknowledge that many of these facilities can and do, but the lack of a distinct pediatric staff or pediatric hospitalist often excluded these facilities from inclusion. They’re still wonderful places and I adore them, they just don’t quite fit.
- Pediatric and adolescent behavioral health was difficult to qualify as well, due to the large “troubled teen industry” masquerading as psychiatric treatment. The epidemic of unfit “care” for mental illness is appalling, and I did my best to include only true mental health care facilities in this project.
- Finally, I am one person and I did this all by myself, from start to finish. There are bound to be some errors, from the data to the spelling. But, I was diligent, and I hope that these errors are at a minimum.
If we can decide now that changing child health changes the future, we hold the future at our fingertips – we hold the power to make a better world.
I can finally conclude this by saying that I know this project is merely done for now. I know me and I know that I will be back here again, improving upon the data as things grow and change. For now, however, I can relax and take a breath knowing that my heart and soul is out there and maybe, just maybe, someone will take this as the call to action that I intended for it to be. The call is this: take any opportunity and every opportunity to be an advocate for child health. We were once all children whose lives were bettered by the advocacy of the generations that came before us, generations who decided that the lives of their children and their children’s children should be so much better than their own. We live in a time of advanced and accessible care, why should it stop here? Why not make it even more advanced? Even more accessible? If we can decide now that changing child health changes the future, we hold the future at our fingertips – we hold the power to make a better world. My beloved reader, if you’ve gotten this far into the end of my optimism, I hope that you’ll join me in being #kidstrong, always and forever.
Final disclaimer: this project was not intended as medical advice. My views are not the views of my employer.
For The Littlest 