In 2010, I was approached by a physician recruiter looking for a medical director for the newborn intensive care unit (NICU) at a children’s hospital in Madera, California.
“Where is that?” I had worked at UCI in the 1980s and thought I knew every children's hospital in the state. “I think it’s near San Diego,” she replied.
I did some research and found that the hospital, Valley Children’s was...in Fresno?!!
My daughter-in-law, a LA native, could not understand why I would want to look there -- My tires would melt in my driveway! We both wondered what could possibly be going on in such a small city that would interest me.
Once I visited, I found my answer. After working in hospital NICUs for 32 years, I knew what good leadership looked like, and I quickly realized this was the real thing: good and talented people whose goals were bold. They wanted Valley Children’s to be the best in the country. What’s more, they clearly had assembled the resources to pursue that dream.
In the years since I came to Valley Children’s, it has accomplished so much. Multiple national awards for excellence and safety. US News & World Report ratings for multiple service lines. Leapfrog ratings for quality and safety. Miraculous outcomes were all achieved for the kids.
New services were added. Heart lung bypass for babies and children with critical heart or lung failure, a whole-body cooling program to provide emergent treatment for babies with birth asphyxia used to minimize brain injury, a donor milk program to provide breast milk for our tiny preemies whose mothers could not provide enough milk for their babies, the ability to administer nitric oxide gas, which costs thousands of dollars a day to administer but saves the lives of our tiny patients, an incredibly talented transport team that flies across the valley stabilizing critically ill children and babies, covering a 30,000 square mile area from Modesto to Bakersfield to Santa Maria to San Luis Obispo – an area larger than many states were all added to better enhance the quality of care we could provide to patients.
Valley Children's also took on the task of training pediatricians who they hoped would find the valley a good place to live and practice, like I did. As a result, Valley Children's has added 45 new doctors to make sure that all children in the valley would have access to quality pediatricians. Valley Children’s has developed many clinical partnerships with regional hospitals to enhance the quality of pediatric care in these institutions as well as our own. In fact, if a baby delivered in many hospitals in the valley needs resuscitation, chances are the doctor called to save that baby will be from Valley Children’s.
Valley Children's also has invested in providing care closer to home for people who today travel long distances to our ED and has committed that no child in the valley will be more than a thirty-minute drive from a Valley Children's facility. Beyond that, Valley Children's has put highly specialized pediatric and obstetric subspecialists in places far from Madera to provide much needed care all along the valley. We have built NICU facilities in three valley host hospitals so that babies born in these places have immediate on-site NICU care provided by Valley Children's nurses and doctors.
When I admit a baby with a complicated case to one of our 132 NICU beds, I am able to consult literally dozens of different pediatric subspecialists to handle nearly every imaginable problem a sick baby can encounter. It is a rare privilege and a luxury I have never experienced before. This attention to the well-being of our patients has helped Valley Children's become one of the best in the U.S., with outcomes that would make anyone proud.
I have spent 46 years working in hospitals taking care of critically ill babies. The list includes Johns Hopkins, UCI, and the Cleveland Clinic. I have never worked in a better managed hospital system than Valley Children's. I am proud to work for an organization that prioritizes what kids need, and in my 12 years at Valley Children's I can testify that our senior leaders make the welfare of the children of this valley their number one priority by always finding ways to provide each and every one of them with high-quality care.
About the Author
Dr. Jeffrey Pietz joined Valley Children’s in February 2010 as Chief of Newborn Medicine. Board certified in neonatal medicine and pediatrics, Dr. Pietz brings more than 25 years of neonatology experience to Valley Children’s. He comes to us from Fairview Hospital (Cleveland Clinic Community Health System) in Cleveland, Ohio, where he was Director of Newborn Medicine and oversaw their Level III NICU and two regional Level II NICUs, as well as helping raise $1 million for the NICU.