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- Children have wonderfully unique qualities about them,
and they deserve and need people who have expertise
in taking care of growing bodies.
Our goal is that every kid who walks through the door
will grow up and become a healthy,
productive survivor and adult.
The Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders, or CCBD,
you will hear people talk about,
is really a multidisciplinary comprehensive group
of individuals that come together
essentially because these are people
who wanna spend their lives fighting the diseases
that affect the patients we take care of.
It can be really a wide range of diseases
that affects the blood, the bone marrow,
and a wide spectrum of different kinds of cancers
or whole system disorders that affect the body's ability
to make good, healthy blood cells,
to make a good immune response against things,
and similarly, a wide range of things
that could be at risk for cancer or become cancer.
Our goal is not just to cure somebody for five years
but it's to cure somebody for a full life.
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I don't wanna provide the standard of care.
I wanna set the standard of care.
I want us to be leading, not following.
When we think about what that is,
we have to be in that top tier of the conversations.
It's our obligation
because we're not gonna take the best care of kids
who need us if we don't.
What does it mean to be nationally ranked?
To me it's about who are we comparing ourselves to,
what other institutions?
"Who are we sitting at the table with?"
is how I'd like to think about that.
When we sit around the table,
we are sitting around the table
with the other top pediatric centers,
not only in North America, but, really, across the globe.
One of the programs that I'm so excited
that we've been able to develop
in the last five to seven years has been Global Health,
and one of our faculty members has done a beautiful job
working with the World Health Organization
to define global oncology care standards
for children around the world.
I think it would be arrogant
to say we're the best at everything.
Nobody should be able to say that, right?
It's not possible, honestly, for what we do.
Are we one of the best? Absolutely.
Do I have physicians here who I would pit
against every other of the best in the country?
Absolutely.
These are diseases that require experts around the world
to be able to define how to make things better
for the patients who are affected
by the diseases we care for.
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Clinical trials and research
and participating in research particularly
for the diseases that we're talking about,
for cancer and blood disorders,
is the reason that kids are surviving today.
We are doing some
of the truly groundbreaking clinical trials
for sickle cell disease, for hemophilia,
for various types of cancer diagnoses,
for what we call cellular therapeutics,
which is really defining
how the immune system can be redirected
and reeducated to fight against different cancers.
Today, survival rates are extraordinary for many patients,
and that is because people have collaborated
in doing clinical research that asks an important question:
Can we make this care better?
For the vast majority of clinical trials,
children who participate in those trials
do better than children who don't.
In many occasions,
those clinical trials set the new standard
of how we should treat a disease.
There are kids alive today
because they participated in a clinical research study,
and kids before them
and their families decided they would participate
in a clinical research study.
We are incredibly lucky
that many of our physicians and nurses,
and nurse practitioners
and physicians assistants are part of designing
the future research, the new clinical trials.
So we have people who are contributing to every element
of these new studies that are being conducted
to better the outcomes for kids.
We use precision medicine every day
in our diagnostics, in our therapeutics.
Everybody's disease is a little bit different,
and we know that there are molecular abnormalities
that drive diseases.
They're the causative reason
that somebody develops one disease or another.
We also know that there are elements at that genomic level
that protect people from getting some diseases, right?
Due to tremendous advances in technology,
we are able to dissect out at the molecular,
deepest, smallest, tiniest measurement,
single cell and inside the single cell abnormality.
That's what is often called precision
or personalized medicine.
But we pool all of those things together
to say at the molecular level
we know what your disease looks like.
We have done essentially a genetic fingerprint
of your disease, whatever it is.
And we know that these are the things
that are most effective in therapy.
These are the things that might be at risk
for causing complications and side effects,
and so we're gonna be really vigilant in looking for those,
all with the end goal of getting through that therapy
with a cure on the other end.
It is essential
to how we can reach the best outcomes for our patients,
how we can develop the best care
and treatment plans for our patients,
and how we can monitor their diseases as well.
It is not easy to do that,
and not every institution can do that.
We are incredibly fortunate
that we have the technology
and the capacity and the expertise here
to be able to provide that level of care for our patients.
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When you come through the doors of Children's Colorado,
you don't just get us,
but you get a global pediatric community
that is solely intending
to give your child the best outcome,
to give you the best outcome.
Every single person that I run into on the average day,
on a daily basis is here
because they care about taking the best care of kids.
They want to solve the problems that the diseases cause.
They want to find answers.
They want to help a child get through this.
They wanna help a family get through it.
We have a total of about 150 faculty,
so that could be nurse practitioners, physicians assistants,
pharmacists, physicians, PhD scientists, PhD psychologists.
We have three times as many nurses, probably total,
that touch our patients in one way or another.
That's a lot of people.
But what that means is that everybody has a specific role
and a specific purpose and a specific expertise.
It feels very much like in some days,
"Well, aren't you all oncologists?"
Well, yes we are,
and we're supposed to all be hematologists and oncologists,
but some of us only do bone marrow transplant,
or some of us only do one type of hematology,
or some of us have an expertise in one type of solid tumor,
which is very different from the others of us
who only take care of children with brain tumors.
Unless you have that focused, committed person
who has spent their life trying to be really,
really the best at taking care of that disorder,
we can't deliver the best care to patients.
I think it's really easy
when you can look somebody in the eye and say,
"I would trust this person with my own child's life
or with my life."
And I feel that way so strongly
about people under our roof here.
That's what you want for your child.
You wanna know that the best person
to be thinking about that kid's problem is on your team,
and that's what our really big team offers.
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You know, when you're facing a devastating illness
for somebody in your family,
everything else that felt normal just falls away.
There is no more normal for a period of time, right?
What they were doing yesterday is a distant memory
to what they are facing that day,
and so all of a sudden we do become
that person's whole community.
You know, people joke you don't get to choose your family
and you don't get to choose
that your child has to necessarily be a patient.
That is the level of how our whole system is committed
to trying to improve the lives of the children
who do walk through the door.
Another really important component
is what we call our Wellness Program,
and wellness in our group is psychology,
social work, child life, art therapy.
We work very, very closely with our physical therapists,
our occupational therapists, our audiologists,
learning services in the hospital, all of the things
that go into trying to help a kid simply be a kid.
This program has really been the model,
not only in our own institution, in other departments,
but across the country for how to build wellness
into the daily medical, scientific, technologic care
and how to support the whole child,
the whole organic aspect of taking on care
for what can be a very devastating disease
for a family to approach.
So one of the things that is really important to us,
I think, here at Children's Colorado
is to be able to support families
who may not live in a large metropolitan area
but they can get their care and benefit
from the expertise that we have here
and hopefully allow them to be at home as much as possible.
To travel sometimes maybe across a mountain pass
or a very long distance,
to spend time in our facility isn't always easy.
And so how we partner with our colleagues and collaborators,
really, around the region is also critical to making sure
that any individual child gets the best outcome
and that their outcome isn't dependent
on their ZIP code or their geography.
I hope that families, when they walk through our doors,
first of all, feel relief,
that they feel that they're in the right place
for everybody in this building
to take the best care of their child possible.
We're gonna engage in a contract with you
to do the best we can for your child and your family.
And I hope that they know
that it's not confined to these walls
that we collaborate, we consult,
we discuss every day with other experts around the country.
Right now, we can't prevent cancer in children.
We can't prevent sickle cell disease.
But we're getting to a point
where we can change the arc of that child's future,
and I don't think any of us is gonna be happy
until we can look at every single parent in the eye,
every single family,
every single patient in the eye and say,
"Look, this is gonna be really rough maybe,"
or, "We're gonna have to walk through this together.
But we're gonna get you through that,
and we're gonna get you to be a healthy,
productive, thoughtful, contributing adult."
I think that's everybody's goal under our roof.
We're not there yet for every patient,
but that's what we're here to do.
Come to Children's Colorado, we will take care of you.
We will do everything we can to get you through this,
and there's nobody I trust more.
We've got this. We are with you in this.
We're gonna walk with it every step of the way.
We'll figure out how to get there.
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