Highlights 2007

Generous Contributions Make a Difference

We at Children’s Hospital & Research Center Foundation would like to invite you to share our pride in our recent accomplishments. Children’s delivers expert, compassionate care in a family-centered medical center, which receives over 200,000 patient visits each year. Donor generosity also allows our clinical physicians and research scientists to advance breakthrough preventions and treatments of cancer, blood diseases and other life-threatening illnesses that benefit countless children worldwide. All day, every day, we give kids our undivided attention.

Below are only a few of the significant 2007 accomplishments that enhance the health and well-being of all children and their families in our community. Your partnership is essential in realizing this extraordinary mission.

Selected 2007 Accomplishments

(Download the complete document here: Highlights 2007)

Breakthrough technology: portable CT scanner now at Children’s
Children’s is the first pediatric hospital on the West Coast to have a portable CereTom CT scanner. This means that medically fragile patients at Children’s no longer have to be moved out of the intensive  care or operating room to get a CT scan.

National leader in cystic fibrosis care
The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation reported that Children’s Hospital Oakland’s Cystic Fibrosis center scored an average of 96.5 percent on lung function tests for kids, compared to the national average of 88.2 percent. Children’s is proud to receive this recognition of our work to make kids with cystic fibrosis healthier.

Offering newer, less invasive surgery for infants
Children’s neurosurgeon Peter Sun, MD, and plastic surgeon Bryant Toth, MD, are among a handful of surgeons in Northern California who are now able to perform an innovative, minimally invasive surgery to correct craniosynostosis, the premature bone fusion that prevents an infant’s skull from expanding as it should to accommodate rapid brain
growth. This new technique is performed through two threecentimeter- long incisions, and the
hospital stay is decreased from the typical seven days to only three.

Offering healthcare to homeless children
Children’s Center for the Vulnerable Child opened a new clinic called Encore Medical Clinic in September 2007 that offers free medical care to homeless kids and provides outreach case managers specializing in the challenges homeless families face. Encore gets referrals from various homeless shelters and from school nurses.