Hosted at the Children’s Mercy Research Institute, the event highlighted the hospital’s commitment to excellence in the areas of graduate medical education, translational research, connective tissue disorders, pediatric orthopedic surgery, radiology research, pediatric molecular oncology and cancer immunotherapy. These achievements are made possible through visionary philanthropic support.

2026 Honorees

• Brenda Rogers, MD 
  Dr. Sidney F. Pakula Endowed Chair in Graduate Medical Education
  
   
• Jordan Jones, DO, MS, FAAP, FACR
  Underdown Yeomans Family Endowed Professorship in Connective Tissue Disorders Care
  
   
• Kathryn Keeler, MD
  Dr. Brad and Dawn Olney Chair in Pediatric Orthopedic Surgery
  
   
• Sherwin Chan, MD, PhD
  Gallagher Family Endowed Professorship in Excellence
  
   
• Tomoo Iwakuma, MD, PhD
  Braden’s Hope for Childhood Cancer Endowed Chair in Pediatric Molecular Oncology
  
   
• Yong Li, PhD
  Paul and Linda DeBruce Endowed Chair in Cancer Immunotherapy

As the hospital continues to expand its academic profile, endowed faculty positions remain central to its legacy of providing the best possible and highest quality care to all children when they need it most.

These appointments provide talented clinicians, researchers and educators with the protected time and resources needed to lead, innovate and mentor the next generation of pediatric medicine. In an increasingly competitive academic environment, endowed positions also play a critical role in recruiting and retaining world-class talent.

For a nonprofit teaching hospital, endowed positions are far more than a title. They are transformative investments in patients, faculty and the future of children’s health.

“These recognize not only past achievement, but future promise, and they provide enduring support for work that advances our mission across clinical care, education, research and discovery,” said Steve Leeder, PharmD, PhD, Senior Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer.

The ceremony also recognized the generous donors whose support established and sustains these endowed appointments. Their enduring commitment helps Children's Mercy remain a leader in pediatric care, research and education for children and families across the region.

• The Louis H. Gross Foundation, Inc. Dr. Lawrence Pakula, a Director
• Kim and Rod Underdown and the Underdown and Yeomans Family
• Dr. Brad and Dawn Olney
• The Diane and Terrence Gallagher Family
• Braden’s Hope for Childhood Cancer
• Paul and Linda Debruce
   

Learn more about the honorees and donors at childrensmercy.org.

At 21 weeks pregnant with their first child, Reese, Taylor and Caleb Jeter received life-changing news: their unborn daughter had fetal heart block, a rare condition that disrupts the heart’s electrical system and can cause a dangerously slow heartbeat.

Living overseas at the time, the family was referred to Children's Mercy, where a multidisciplinary team of specialists came together to guide them through the remainder of the pregnancy and prepare for Reese’s complex care needs after birth.

Through careful monitoring and coordinated care, Reese was safely delivered and underwent surgery shortly after birth to support her heart. Along the way, the Jeters developed deep trust in the experts at Children’s Mercy who cared for both their daughter and their family.

After Reese’s diagnosis, Taylor learned she had Sjögren’s disease, an autoimmune condition that can increase the risk of fetal heart block during pregnancy. So, when the couple learned they were expecting a second child, Tate, they worked closely with their medical team and hoped for a different outcome.

See the full story via KCTV 5

The Ward Family Heart Center at Children's Mercy

Whenever crowds gather for major events, a host city inherits more than the event itself—it inherits the safety, health and care of those who arrive. As thousands of people fill venues and the streets around them, the hospitals nearby become part of the event. The World Health Organization notes that such mass gatherings “can pose public health risks and strain the public health resources” of the hosting community, and a recent report found spikes in emergency visits for up to 12 hours after such events. With elevated heat risk across 14 of the 16 2026 FIFA World Cup host cities, further exacerbating the possibility of hospital admissions, coupled with an influx of international travelers possibly introducing pathogens, hospitals and healthcare leaders must be prepared.

Few people understand the convergence of risk better than Dr. Jennifer Watts. As the Associate Chief Medical Officer—Acute Care and Inpatient Services at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City—one of the top children’s hospitals in the United States—she has spent her career caring for patients and preparing for the improbable, yet possible, including days when events can take a turn for the worse. Preparedness, she says, is not a plan that sits on a shelf, but a trained discipline. “We must understand the possible impacts and anticipate what can go wrong in advance, to properly mitigate risks the day of. As healthcare leaders, we must be able to swiftly react to what has occurred and properly lead through it to make sure people are receiving the proper level of care.”

Read the full article via GE HealthCare

The events raise money for pediatric cancer research and support for Children's Mercy.

As TODAY's Al Roker reports, since starting in 2010, the Big Slick has raised more than $34 million and continues to grow.

See the full story via The TODAY Show.

Learn more about Big Slick 

The Children's Mercy Cancer Center

Research information for families

If you were to meet Wyatt today, you’d see a joyful, energetic little boy who loves Disney movies, baseball and making people laugh. Happiest when he’s with his family, Wyatt is finally getting to enjoy the simple moments of childhood, but his journey hasn’t been simple.

Wyatt’s care at Children’s Mercy began before he was born. At a routine 20-week ultrasound, what should have been a joyful milestone quickly became devastating. His parents learned that his kidneys, ureters and bladder were severely swollen, and they weren’t sure if their baby would survive.

“Transitioning from being a mom of one healthy kiddo to a medical mom is a shift nothing can fully prepare you for,” his mom, Hannah, said.

Soon after, the family was referred to Children’s Mercy, where the Elizabeth J. Ferrell Fetal Health Center took over care for the remainder of Hannah’s pregnancy. For 17 weeks, specialists from fetal health, neonatology and nephrology worked together to guide the family through an overwhelming time such as answering questions, explaining what to expect and offering reassurance along the way.

See the full story and the tower lighting via KCTV 5

The Brendan Tripp Elam Transplant Center at Children's Mercy

Children’s Mercy is proud to announce the addition of Troy Spilde, MD, to its Springfield team as a Pediatric General Surgeon. This strategic expansion reflects the continued commitment to delivering exceptional pediatric care to families in southwest Missouri.

Dr. Spilde brings more than 20 years of experience in pediatric general surgery and marks a return to Children’s Mercy where he completed his fellowship training after graduating from University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences and completing his residency at UMKC/Truman Medical Center. His fellowship training included a Pediatric Surgery Research Fellowship year, Surgical Critical Care Fellowship and Pediatric Surgery Fellowship.

His career also includes previous leadership roles at Mercy Springfield and St. John’s Children’s Hospital in Springfield, Ill. In addition to these roles, he has also served as an Assistant Professor in Clinical Surgery at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and Clinical Assistant Professor of Surgery at the University of Missouri, reflecting a deep commitment to advancing care and collaboration.

Dr. Spilde focuses on delivering the highest standard of care for patients and will work closely with Children’s Mercy and Mercy Springfield department of surgery teams whose leadership and dedication have been instrumental in building a strong foundation for pediatric care in Springfield.

“We are very excited to welcome Dr. Spilde to the team,” said Debbie Schwartzkopf, DNP, RN, CPHQ, Children’s Mercy with Mercy Interim Chief Administrative Officer. “Dr. Spilde represents the first of what we hope are many new physician hires to help us enhance the pediatric specialty services at Mercy Springfield and to fulfill our commitment to the community to improve the health and well-being of children with specialty pediatric care options closer to home.”

PRESS RELEASE: Children's Mercy and Mercy Springfield Communities to Build Dedicated Pediatric Facility in Springfield

Children's Mercy with Mercy

Hosted at the Children’s Mercy Research Institute, the event highlighted the hospital’s commitment to excellence in the areas of liver transplant care, hematology, oncology and bone marrow transplant, developmental and behavioral health and medical administration – achievements made possible through visionary philanthropic support.

2025 Honorees

C. Andrew Bonham, MD, FACS

James F. Daniel, MD Endowed Chair in Liver Care

Shannon Carpenter, MD, MS

Robert and Doris Hamilton Family Endowed Chair in Hematology, Oncology and Bone Marrow Transplant

Rebecca Johnson, PhD, ABPP

Nick Timmons Endowed Chair in Developmental and Behavioral Health

Alejandro Quiroga, MD, MBA

Alice Berry, DDS and Katharine Berry, MD, Endowed Chair in Executive Leadership

Douglas C. Rivard, DO

Schellhorn Family Endowed Chair in Medical Administration

As the hospital continues to expand its academic profile, endowed faculty positions remain a cornerstone of its vision to build a world of wellbeing for all children.

They ensure our talented clinicians, researchers and change makers have the protected time and resources to lead, innovate and teach the next generation. In a competitive academic landscape, they are particularly vital – helping us to recruit and retain the brightest minds in pediatric medicine.

For a nonprofit teaching hospital like Children’s Mercy, endowed positions are so much more than a title. They are transformative investments in our patients, our faculty and the future of pediatric medicine.

“Endowed positions empower our faculty to ask bold questions, explore groundbreaking research and turn discoveries into better care for children. These opportunities wouldn’t be possible without the community champions who believe in advancing pediatric medicine and research and making a lasting impact,” said Jenea Oliver, Senior Vice President and Chief Development Officer, Children’s Mercy.

The ceremony also celebrated the generous donors behind each chair.  Their enduring support ensures Children’s Mercy remains a center of excellence for children and families across the region.

• Marge and Montie Tripp Family
• Doris Hamilton and Myron Sildon
• Fore the Kids Foundation
• Anonymous donors in honor of Alice Berry Graham and Katharine Berry Richardson, sisters and founders of Children’s Mercy
• Charles and Lisa Schellhorn

Learn more about the honorees and donors

“I’m so excited. We’ve been planning this for nearly a year, and the day is here!”

It’s 7 a.m., and Kathyn Keeler, MD, an Orthopedist, paces eagerly in the Adele Hall entrance near the operating rooms (OR), her scrub cap pulled tight, her eyes glistening as she and her team await the arrival of 11-year-old Caoimhe (pronounced Keev-a, meaning “beautiful, gentle, kind”). Nearby, a fellow surgeon holds a small lab coat custom embroidered in purple thread that reads: Dr. Caoimhe Harley, Orthopedic Surgery. The scrub cap made just for her includes dainty flowers, one of her favorite symbols of beauty and growth.

While Caoimhe and her family are no strangers to driving 100 miles to Kansas City to receive specialized care for her condition, called progressive hereditary spastic paraparesis, this day was different. Today, Caoimhe works alongside her heroes and serves as a surgeon in the operating room – a dream she has had since early childhood as Children’s Mercy became a regular part of her life story.

See the full story via KCTV 5

Surgery at Children's Mercy

By Chaunie Brusie

Not every nurse can say they know what it's like to be a patient on the floor where they now work, but Caleb Wolf certainly can. Diagnosed at just two years old with Chiari malformations and pseudotumor cerebri, conditions that caused serious pain, seizures, cognitive issues, and vision problems, Wolf would go on to have more than 100 surgeries and treatments at Children’s Mercy Kansas City hospital in Missouri. 

Wolf faced enormous challenges throughout his long-term stays as a pediatric patient, but fought, not just for himself, but for other patients like him who were forced to spend their holidays in the hospital. He founded a non-profit that gifted kids with holiday and other special gifts during their hospital stays, and then later, as an adult, he found the ultimate way to give back:

He became a nurse himself and now works as a staff RN at the same hospital where he practically grew up. 

A Rare Beacon of Hope

Wolf tells Nurse.org that his favorite part about his work now as an RN on the pediatric orthopedics floor is seeing the hope and connection that just his presence can offer patients and families. His specific medical condition means that he is an adult who lives with a permanent brain shunt, a medical device that Wolf explains is a rarity.

Read the full article via Nurse.org

Nursing at Children's Mercy

Big Slick, Kansas City’s favorite celebrity fundraiser benefiting Children’s Mercy, launched its 16th year with laughs, heartfelt moments and a shared sense of purpose. Many are familiar with the pre-Royals celebrity softball game and T-Mobile Center Big Slick Show, but Big Slick is a three-day event that brings so much joy into our hospital walls — including patient bingo, a magic show, patient visits and Friendly Feud in the Big Slick Auditorium, a space named in honor of the event’s extraordinary impact.

Children’s Mercy President and CEO Alejandro (Ale) Quiroga kicked off the May 30 press conference with an inspiring speech.

“Big Slick happens organically in a city like this,” said Ale. “You can’t build this with a business plan. It takes Kansas City, and it takes Children’s Mercy. For the past 16 years, we’ve raised $25 million and changed how pediatric cancer is diagnosed and treated around the world.”

Ale shared the powerful story of Colin, a 4-year-old patient diagnosed with a rare congenital cancer. Genetic sequencing not only guided Colin’s treatment, it led to testing that revealed a separate cancer risk in his father, prompting life-saving surgery. That same testing is now helping protect Colin’s younger siblings.

“Who would have thought a poker tournament would lead to a life-saving diagnosis for an entire family?” he said.

The hosts reflected on the evolution of Big Slick from its early days as a celebrity poker tournament to a powerhouse weekend of fundraising and community connection.

“Every year it feels like a big hug,” Gardner said. “It’s not just a fundraiser. It’s a family reunion with purpose.”

Asked what they hoped people would remember about Big Slick years from now, the hosts were unified. “That it made a difference,” Sudeikis said. “We love showing off our hometown. We bring people here, and they see how special it is — especially the people and this hospital.”

Big Slick 2025 raised a record-breaking $4.5 million

The hosts and guests, which this year included more than 50 celebrities, gathered Saturday night at the T-Mobile Center for an unforgettable night of performances and fundraising.

One of the most powerful moments of the evening came when the crowd learned about Peter — a cellist, a Boy Scout, an athlete, a chess player… and a fighter. While bravely undergoing treatment for cancer at Children’s Mercy, Peter chose to give back. He started his own fundraiser and donated every penny of his savings — $1,800 — to help other kids like him.

Sadly, Peter passed away just two weeks before this year’s Big Slick. But his spirit and selflessness lit up the T-Mobile Center. After his story played during the show, Peter’s family joined our hosts on stage, where, through heartbreak and with incredible grace, Peter’s father shared his son’s wish: That we continue the fight against cancer in his name.

And the crowd responded. Paddle after paddle went up — many matching Peter’s $1,800 donation — in a wave of love and purpose that helped raise a record-setting $4.5 million.

As always, the highlight of the weekend was the deep connection between the hosts, the hospital and Kansas City.

“Kansas City shows up year after year,” said Riggle. “We just keep the ball rolling — but this city makes the ball bigger.”

Although she experienced it all firsthand over the last 56 years – teaching pediatric trauma courses internationally, medical mission trips to far corners of the world and four decades with Chicago’s pre-eminent pediatric hospital – Hawkins acknowledges she never expected any of it. Needless to say, an award recognizing a lifetime of committed work was also never on her radar.

On Wednesday, ENA announced Hawkins as the recipient of the 2025 Judith C. Kelleher Award, the association’s most prestigious honor bearing the name of its co-founder.

For Hawkins, of Oak Park, Illinois, her global travels are juxtaposed with 42 years at Anne & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in a wide variety of roles, including her current work as a resuscitation education nursing professional development specialist. Through it all, she never lost sight of her love for pediatric emergency care and its family-centered care approach. She gives back through charitable work in her own community, while continuing to support ENA as a member of the Illinois ENA Council Board of Directors.

“If I had to do it over, I would do it again. I would totally do it again,” Hawkins said of her career as part of an ENA Podcast interview. “I’m so honored that these amazing people think of me like that. I’m just so happy and excited.”

ENA President Ryan Oglesby, PhD, MHA, RN, CEN, CFRN, NEA-BC, marveled at Hawkins’ contributions within the emergency nursing specialty and beyond it.

“Harriet’s career journey represents the essence of what emergency nurses do. Over the course of five decades, she humbly sought new opportunities and, at each turn, she ended up making an immeasurable difference in the lives of countless people – her patients, her peers and communities around the world,” Oglesby said. 

On Wednesday, ENA also announced 13 other individual award recipients, as well as the annual Council Achievement Awards and this year’s Team Awards.

“Every emergency nurse begins their day with an opportunity to change someone’s life. This year’s award recipients have shaped their careers in ways ensure they impact others in meaningful ways – providing the clinical support ED nurses need to deliver care, advocating for their patients and peers, and being valuable members of the communities where they live and work,” Oglesby added.

The 2025 ENA award recipients and other honorees will be recognized during Emergency Nursing 2025 in New Orleans Sept. 17-20:

Behind the Scenes Award:

Jan Turner, MSN, RN, CEN, of Georgia

Clinical Nurse Specialist Award:

Dawn Zakzesky, MSN, RN, CNS-BC, CEN, of Wisconsin

Crisis Response Team Award:

Children’s Mercy Adele Hall Team, of Missouri

Fort Duncan Regional Medical Center ED Team, of Texas

Frank L. Cole Nurse Practitioner Award:

Melanie Gibbons Hallman, DNP, CRNP, CNS, FAAN, FAANP, FAEN, of Alabama

Gail P. Lenehan Advocacy Award:

Danita Mullins, MSN, RN, CEN, of Arkansas

Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives of the Year Award:

Hershaw Davis, Jr., DNP, MBA, RN, of Maryland

Lifetime Achievement Award:

Mary Leblond, MSN, RN, CEN, SANE, FAEN, of Texas

Gwyn Parris-Atwell, DNP, FNP-BC, CEN, FAEN, of New Jersey

Sally Snow, BSN, RN, CPEN, FAEN, of Texas

Nurse Leader Award:

Kristin Malvik, MSN-ED, RN, of Texas

Nurse Researcher Award:

Jane Muir, PhD, RN, FNP-BC, of Pennsylvania

Nursing Competency in Aging Award:

Megan Lundquist, BSN, RN, of Arkansas

Nursing Education Award:

Karen Schill, DNP, APN, FNP-BC, ENP-C, CEN, CFRN, NREMT-P, of New Jersey

Pediatric Readiness Improvement Award:

Sara Daykin, DNP, RN, CPEN, TCRN, FAEN, of New Mexico

Council/Chapter Government Affairs Award:

California ENA Government Affairs Committee

Texas ENA Council

Wisconsin ENA Council

Team Awards: 

Indiana ENA Forensics Committee

Jefferson East Emergency Department Education Team, of New Jersey

Texas ENA Conference Planning Committee

In addition to the individual honors, 10 states – Florida, Illinois, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Wisconsin – received 2025 Council Achievement Awards for their outstanding local efforts last year.

We are proud to share that Children’s Mercy has been named a 2025 Wellbeing First Champion through the American Medical Association and the Dr. Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation. This distinction means that our credentialing and peer evaluation documents are free from stigmatizing language around mental health and team members can seek care without fear of losing their license or job. 

This accomplishment has been verified by ALL IN: Wellbeing First for Healthcare — a national coalition of leading health care organizations that works to remove barriers for health workers to access mental health care.

In the midst of a global mental health crisis, the Lorna Breen Heroes’ Foundation emerged. Named after Dr. Breen, a compassionate and dedicated physician who tragically lost her life to suicide, the foundation is committed to reducing burnout among health care professionals. The foundation emphasizes that seeking mental health services is a sign of strength, not weakness. By advising health care industries on wellbeing initiatives, working to reduce stigma, and funding research, the foundation strives to create a healthier and more supportive environment for all health care workers.  

Her legacy also inspired the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act — a landmark legislation aimed at protecting and supporting those who tirelessly care for others.   

If you, or someone you know is struggling, don't wait to reach out for help.

• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 988 
• Lorna Breen Heroes' Foundation 
• Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 

Children's Mercy Center for Wellbeing

One of only 16 organizations to achieve the designation, Children’s Mercy collaborated with CDI to continue advancing its disability inclusion efforts. Language and Accessibility Services, Project RISE, the Office of Equity and Diversity, Human Resources and Patient and Family Services partnered to identify and tackle specific inclusion milestones throughout the year.

 “This award is such a strong reflection of who we are as an institution and what values are important to us as we serve the community,” said Tom Wright, Executive Vice President, Chief Human Resources Officer.

The multidisciplinary team started with CDI’s benchmarking survey to measure accessibility and accommodations, career development and retention, compensation benefits, diversity and inclusion, matrix and analytics, and more.

“They identified areas we really thrived in as an organization and then areas that we could improve,” said Amy Mesplay, Project RISE Manager. “From feedback, we picked out core areas to focus on through 2024.”

The team completed four important milestones this past year:

1. Continued disability inclusion upgrades to restrooms by installing eight more automatic door openers and one new adult changing table.
   
    
2. Collaborated with Disability Support Services departments at 13 area colleges to raise awareness of opportunities at Children’s Mercy.
   
    
3. Created an internal Accessibility Benchmark Survey to help collect data and inform our ongoing commitment to being an accessible organization for all team members, patients and families.
   
    
4. Offered a variety of system-wide disability inclusion team member education opportunities to improve understanding and awareness.

In addition to identifying and accomplishing these milestone goals, the team also attended monthly networking meetings and educational opportunities, completed the Society for Human Resource Management Foundation’s Employing Abilities at Work Certification, and met with CDI every six weeks for guidance and feedback.

The team will continue cooperation with CDI in 2025 and has invited Patient Advocates into the process.  

“We want to be the best we can be for our employees, but we also have a big focus on our patients and families,” said Amy. “With the Patient Advocate group, we’ll have their voice and see what we need to work on as an organization.”

Other immediate to-dos for the team include conducting and analyzing the internal benchmarking survey, improving employee education accessibility and developing more disability inclusion training for frontline staff.

“We already hit the ground running to start the 2025 process!” said Amy.

“Rapid and scalable personalized ASO screening in patient-derived organoids” outlines how the authors were able to create patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) and use them to validate personalized treatments in only eight weeks, much faster than the industry average. The paper explains their process, and the team hopes other institutions will adopt their methods to help rare disease patients all over the world get better, faster care.

“We put in every detail,” said Scott T. Younger, PhD, Director, Disease Gene Engineering, Genomic Medicine Center, and leader of The Younger Laboratory. “We even added extra supplementary material. There are no proprietary steps; this needs to be going on everywhere.”

The study’s co-authors are John C. Means, PhD, research scientist, Genomic Medicine Center; Anabel L. Martinez Bengochea, PhD, post-doctoral research scholar, Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology; Daniel A. Louiselle, MS, research assistant, Genomic Medicine Center; Jacqelyn M. Nemechek, PhD, research scientist, Hematology/Oncology/BMT; John M. Perry, PhD, doctoral research faculty, Hematology/Oncology/BMT; Emily G. Farrow, PhD, CGC, Assistant Clinical Director, Clinical Genetics; Tomi Pastinen, MD, PhD, Division Director, Genomic Medicine Center; and Dr. Younger.

“The ‘bedside-to-bench-to-bedside' application of the patient-derived organoid model system developed by Dr. Younger and his team is an excellent example of how challenges faced by patients, their families and their providers help us prioritize the integration of research with clinical care at Children's Mercy,” said Steve Leeder, PharmD, PhD, CMRI’s Interim Executive Director.

“[The publication] is a really cool opportunity to share the work we’ve done with Genomic Answers for Kids,” said Dr. Younger, whose lab aims to shorten the distance between clinical and functional genomics. “It’s a highly visible journal, so it puts us on the radar of leading the charge on patient-derived rare disease models.”

Driven by personal experience

The article marks not only an important advancement in efficient, patient-specific genomics, but a milestone in a deeply personal quest for its lead author, Dr. Means. His stepson, Trent, is currently a thriving, straight-A junior high student. But when Dr. Means met his now-wife, Chrislyn, Trent was a toddler with an undiagnosed rare condition and brain abnormalities. He was born with encephalocele, a condition that caused some of his brain tissue to be located in his nose.

Fortunately, Trent was successfully treated through surgery, but they still don’t know the genetic causes behind the encephalocele. Dr. Means and Chrislyn were also concerned their younger son, Leuk, could have a rare condition: His fontanelle (soft spot) wasn’t closing, but it healed on its own with time.

When a position at the CMRI Genomic Medicine Center opened up, John and Chrislyn talked about how great it would be to help families like theirs get answers. “I thought it was the best opportunity to somehow make a difference in another kid’s life,” said Dr. Means.

Faster, more efficient answers

Dr. Means joined the Genomic Medicine Center in January 2020 and dove head-first into one of their biggest research challenges: faster and more affordable personalized genomic testing processes.

“We have very diverse rare disease patients,” said Dr. Younger. “We want to be able to do as much as we can for as many people as we can. Scalability is baked into all of our decisions.”

Labs have been generating patient-derived iPSCs for research and personalized medicine applications for almost 20 years. These stem cell lines can be directed down a differentiation path to become organoids, 3-dimensional cell models that replicate patients’ organ development and function. Organoids are particularly helpful when diagnosing conditions that are more prevalent in a certain organ and/or testing organ-specific treatment responses.

But it can be expensive and time-consuming to create patient-derived iPSCs and organoids. Other research organizations charge $5,000 to $10,000 per patient and take between six months and a year to deliver a quality stem cell line and/or organoid...at which point testing can begin.

“Our patients don’t want to wait forever,” said Dr. Means. “My job was to say, ‘How fast and efficient can we make this process?’”

Dr. Means started with the current literature and began combining different proven approaches to build a more robust system. “I spent long and intense hours working on this,” said Dr. Means, “and then, all of a sudden, it clicked.”

The process Dr. Means and his co-authors developed uses only a small number of patient blood cells and significantly lowers both time (around 85% faster) and cost (less than 4% of current market pricing). In addition, the team can process multiple organoids at once, leading to much faster test interventions.

Instead of waiting more than a year for test results, a family could go from blood draw to diagnosis and/or treatment recommendation in a month or two.

Dr. Means is still refining the process and has improved efficiency beyond the current paper’s publication data.

“John really worked hard to optimize the process to a point where iPSC creation only costs about $200 and takes two to three weeks,” said Dr. Younger. “And these turn out to be really high-quality stem cell lines.”

Research with real-time results

With CMRI’s emphasis on translational research, the team's process improvements served a patient-specific purpose. While other labs mostly research with commercially available stem cell lines, the Genomic Medicine Center is able to create lines and organoids for current GA4K patients.

“A major motivation behind the lines we’ve generated thus far is that we believed doing so would provide information,” said Dr. Younger. "We can actually see what happens with the genetic background of actual patients. That’s unlocked amazing opportunities for us.”

In the second part of the paper, the team described a method for faster preclinical testing for three GA4K patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). These patients’ genetic variants were good candidates for treatment with antisense oligonucleotides (ASOs). ASOs are synthetic nucleic acids that bind to RNA in a sequence-specific way to reduce, modify or restore proteins — like dystrophin, the protein DMD patients struggle to produce.

There are already four conditionally FDA-approved ASOs that increase dystrophin production, with others in development. The team wanted to see if they could identify ASOs that could restore dystrophin protein in these patients’ stem cells and/or organoids, which would suggest they could help treat the whole patient.

And they did: Using an ASO matching an approved sequence, the team was able to restore dystrophin protein in one patient’s stem cell line within five days. They also restored dystrophin protein in two siblings’ stem cell lines (as well as contraction rates and calcium levels in their cardiac organoids) with a new ASO designed to target their specific intronic variant.

“We demonstrated the ability to go from patient blood draw to evaluating personalized therapeutics in as little as 6 to 8 weeks — a process that before could take up to a year,” said Dr. Younger. “It gave us confidence we could use these lines and organoids to evaluate therapeutic responses.”

Bedside-to-bench-to-bedside research continues

The close tie between research and clinical efforts at Children’s Mercy leads to much faster practical outcomes than independent labs can produce. As they continue to finetune their process, the team is already helping Children’s Mercy clinicians tailor treatments to patients. They recently tested different seizure medications on a patient-derived brain organoid.

“One of the cool things about working here is that you can actually help some patients in real time,” said Dr. Means. “We were able to narrow down to a therapeutic that worked without the patient having to go through months of trial and error.”

“It’s anecdotal,” said Dr. Younger, “but it feels pretty good. This might be a path forward.”

Dr. Means is currently expanding testing capabilities to be able to do large drug screens with hundreds of patient-derived organoids simultaneously for even more efficient answers. His excitement for precision medicine’s future makes him wonder about the past.

“With my stepson, if we had these capabilities back then, what would we have known?” asked Dr. Means. “What type of help, be it therapy or medicines, could we have given him to have made it a little easier?”

“We got lucky with the surgery being enough for Trent, but we still have unanswered questions,” said Dr. Means. “I figure there are a lot of families out there with the same situation. If you can give some type of answer to a family, they don’t have to wonder if they could have done something more.”

Sharing a blueprint for “something more”

Dr. Younger said researchers all over the world are studying how to deliver that “something more” to rare disease patients. Others are working to overcome the regulatory and cost challenges of designing treatments for one patient at a time. Children’s Mercy just super-charged their efforts with the blueprints for a faster and more efficient patient-specific genomics process.

“Patient-derived organoid models can not only be applied more broadly to create cellular systems for investigating disorders involving the heart, kidney, liver and other tissues, but the approach can also be applied to distinguish between medications likely to work for a given patient and those that may not,” said Dr. Leeder. “Having the capacity to leverage the patient-derived organoid platform at scale uniquely positions Children's Mercy's research enterprise to become ‘bedside-to-bench-to bedside-and beyond’.”

“My vision for the future is that programs like ours would exist everywhere,” said Dr. Younger. “Rare disease is not a centralized problem. At the same time, it’s very clear that our platform is so robust and scalable that people want to start using it now. We’re interested in making as big an impact as we can.”

High-impact journal The Lancet just published a first-of-its-kind study led by Shawn St. Peter, MD, Senior Vice President, Surgeon-in-Chief and Interim Chief Scientific Officer, Children's Mercy Kansas City.

“Appendicectomy* versus antibiotics for acute uncomplicated appendicitis in children” describes the APPY Trial, the first large-scale, randomized clinical trial on the subject. Dr. St. Peter’s co-authors from Children’s Mercy included Janelle R. Noel-MacDonnell, PhD, Health Services and Outcomes, and Pete Muenks, ACRP-CP, Senior Clinical Research Coordinator, Children’s Mercy Research Institute (CMRI).

The APPY trial ran between January 2016 and December 2021. It included 11 children’s hospitals and 936 patients, 5 to 16 years old, with suspected non-perforated appendicitis. Families who chose to participate in the trial were randomly assigned a treatment path: antibiotics or appendectomy.

The study compares the failure rates of those two unequal options: Antibiotics avoid surgery but can come with unpleasant side effects and a chance of recurrence. Appendectomies are low-risk surgeries with short recovery times and no risk of recurrence. 

“The question is what recurrence rate would you accept in order to avoid an operation?” said Dr. St. Peter. “As a working group, we settled on greater than a 20% difference in failure rates would be inferior.”

With a failure rate difference outside of that acceptable range, the study concluded that “antibiotic treatment for uncomplicated appendicitis in children was inferior to appendectomy in this trial.”

The study also found that the total time spent in the hospital was shorter with appendectomies. That outcome was influenced by the antibiotic treatment’s in-hospital IV protocol and recurrences that sent patients back to the hospital. However, patients treated by antibiotics bounced back to “normal function” a little faster than appendectomy patients, who needed to recover from surgery.

A real-world study

For patients treated with surgery, the study considered a negative appendectomy (when the removed appendix shows no signs of disease) a failure (7%). For patients treated with antibiotics, failure was defined as needing to have an appendectomy within one year (34%). Most of those appendectomies happened within the first 100 days.

“What does Mom think of that number?” said Dr. St. Peter of that 1/3 chance of appendicitis recurrence after antibiotic treatment. “It’s within the eye of the beholder. If somebody’s terrified of an operation, that might seem reasonable.”

The antibiotics failure rate included patients who were assigned antibiotic treatment but whose families later requested an appendectomy. “This is a pragmatic, real-world study,” said Dr. St. Peter. “You’re going to have dissatisfied families that within a day or two are going to say, ‘enough.’”

Research informs future treatment guidelines

The study fills a needed gap in appendicitis treatment literature and provides evidence-based talking points for discussing treatment options with parents.

"We know what the failure rates are for all stratifications of patients with appendicitis,” said Dr. St. Peter. “Now that we’ve got the playing rules, we can put together the game.”

The team will continue to research the most beneficial place for antibiotics in appendicitis treatment pathways. They are currently submitting a grant to study sending patients home from the ER with oral antibiotics (instead of the current study’s protocol of starting with 12+ hours of IV antibiotics). “If that were to be successful, then, the next evolution could be point-of-care antibiotic treatment for early appendicitis.”

* “Appendicectomy” is the British spelling of “appendectomy” used by The Lancet.

Surgery at Children's Mercy Kansas City

The Children’s Mercy Research Institute served as the perfect setting to celebrate the elevation of this esteemed group of clinicians, researchers and leaders to academic medicine’s highest achievement and the generous donors who made these endowed positions possible.

Donor investment in endowed faculty positions is highly impactful for an academic health center like Children’s Mercy. Each creates a stable financial foundation that supports the holder’s salary, research and academic activities. As a result, these positions help attract and retain top-tier physicians and researcher by providing them with the resources and recognition need to purse innovative work. They signify a commitment to excellence in pediatric health care, encouraging continuous advancements in medical research, leadership and patient care.

“Endowed faculty positions represent one of the most meaningful forms of philanthropy - leaving a lasting legacy that directly impacts children’s health and well-being. These positions are not only prestigious, but also essential for fostering an environment of innovation and excellence in pediatric medicine,” said Paul Kempinski, Children’s Mercy President and CEO, Alice Berry, DDS, and Katharine Berry, MD, Endowed Chair in Executive Leadership. “The impact: best-in-class experts and care for children and families who call Kansas City and our region home.”

2024 Honorees

Brooke Fridley, MS, PhD
Stanley H. Durwood Foundation Endowed Chair in Health Outcomes

Stephanie Meyer, MS-FNP, RN, NEA-BC
Bernell Hevner O’Donnell, RN Endowed Chair – Chief Nursing Officer

Laura Vricella, MD, FACOG
Elizabeth J. Ferrell Chair in Maternal Fetal Medicine

Thank you to the Stanley H. Durwood Foundation, Dr. Randall and Melva O’Donnell and Jim and Elizabeth Ferrell for their visionary leadership and generosity in establishing these vital positions to ensure Children’s Mercy remains a center of excellence for children and families in our community. Together, we are building a world of well-being for all children.

Learn more about the honorees and donors

Braedon, who played football, baseball and wrestled for Junction City (Kan.) High School, is a focused, determined kid who loves hunting and fishing. “Braedon is my quiet, introverted kid,” said Terrah. “He can read the room and study people better than anyone I know.” 

Terrah, who is a nurse midwife at Stormont Vail Hospital in Topeka, took Braedon to several different orthopedic and sports medicine specialists to try to find the source of his pain. “We thought at first that it was a brachioplexus injury from wrestling,” Terrah recalled. “He would lose feeling in his left arm and hand off and on. It would get better, he’d be cleared for sports, and then end up in severe pain again.”

After months of dealing with this frustrating cycle, Braedon began to struggle with his mental health as well. “One night, we had a really tough, desperate 4 a.m. conversation,” Terrah shared. “Braedon was just begging me to fix the problem. The advocate in me just couldn’t give up on him.” 

The Stroda family is full of fighting spirit. Terrah herself is a cancer survivor, but unfortunately her husband Brandon passed away from cancer in 2017. “Since the passing of Braedon’s dad, our family has a ‘don’t quit’ motto,” Terrah said. “You can’t sit in that hopelessness.” 

Braedon himself has been a patient at Children’s Mercy since he was one week old. He was born with a cleft lip and palate and the Craniofacial team has performed 14 surgeries over the years to correct that. So while hospital life was nothing new for them, this situation felt different.

The search for answers continues

Terrah made Braedon an appointment with the Children’s Mercy Sports Medicine team, who suspected there was more than a sports-related injury at the root of Braedon’s pain and referred him to John Anderson, MD, in the Spine Clinic. More in-depth imaging studies showed an osteoid osteoma, a small, non-cancerous mass on his spine near the base of his skull. 

“It was unclear at the time if the mass was contributing to the pain,” said Christian Kaufman, MD, FAANS, a neurosurgeon who was part of Braedon’s care team. “After very careful review, it started to make sense: Yes, it fits that this small benign lesion does seem to be a probable cause of his pain. But then the next big challenge is how do we get to this location, because it’s a very challenging one.”

Traditional surgical approaches to remove the mass on Braedon’s spine were very risky. “His mass was unique in that it was in a really difficult anatomic place,” said Douglas Rivard, DO, Executive Vice President and Physician-in-Chief and an interventional radiologist on Braedon’s care team. “Initially, we tried to access Braedon’s mass in radiology and [computerized tomography (CT)] and we just didn't have a good anatomic window. One of the main arteries that feeds the back of his brain was in the way, so we had to cut short that procedure and regroup.”

If at first you don’t succeed...

That first unsuccessful attempt to remove the mass in April 2023 was a big disappointment for Braedon, his family and his surgical team. However, Dr. Rivard was determined to find another way. He spent time reading, researching and thinking about Braedon’s situation while on a previously scheduled vacation shortly after the first attempt to remove the mass. When he came back to work, he pulled in several other Children’s Mercy specialists, including plastic surgeon Shao Jiang, MD, and additional members of the neurosurgery team. Together, they came up with a new plan.

Rather than entering through the back of the neck, Braedon’s team decided to try a trans-oral approach: going through the mouth. “As pediatric plastic surgeons who do cleft surgery, that’s an area that we typically can access pretty easily,” said Dr. Jiang. “So I just scrubbed in and used a special retractor for cleft lip and palate to open up the mouth and allow the neurosurgeons to use a neural navigation tool to pinpoint and access exactly where the lesion was.”

“Collaboration is the key to everything” 

A trans-oral approach to the cervical spine is sometimes used for adults, but this was the first time the Children’s Mercy team had successfully used that strategy on a pediatric patient. All of Braedon’s doctors stressed that it was the collaboration and top-tier facilities at Children’s Mercy that made this unique surgery possible. “I think that our collegiality here is so good that we could pull aside any expert walking down the hall and say, ‘Hey, you know what, I have this particular clinical challenge, and I would appreciate if you could consider it,’” reflected Dr. Jiang.

Neurosurgeon Dr. Kaufman agreed. “It was a combination of multiple fields coming together to figure out how to use these new and innovative tools and ways to get there safely,” he said. “Collaboration is the key to everything — that's why it went so well,” he emphasized. The surgical team knew there were still risks to the alternative approach, but they felt that together, they could have a better chance at removing the painful mass.

Joyful tears

Terrah vividly remembers the moment Dr. Rivard came to update her after the second surgery in June of 2023: “He couldn’t get to me fast enough! He made a beeline for me and had a massive smile and said, ‘We got it!’” And we both had a moment. It was a very intense, phenomenal, inspiring moment for me to see that it actually worked.” 

Braedon, on the other hand, wanted to see proof. Terrah recalls that as soon as he woke up, he insisted on seeing Dr. Rivard so he could know for sure that the mass was out.

Things improved significantly for Braedon after the procedure, and he was enjoying school, hunting and hanging out with his friends again. But a few months later, his pain started up again. The type of tumor Braedon had emits prostaglandin, a substance that causes bone pain. Even with only a tiny amount of tumor cells remaining, the tumor had continued to replicate itself and had grown back in the same area. 

Third time’s the charm

“There was a big moment of a loss of hope,” Terrah shared. But true to their family’s fighting spirit, Terrah and Braedon returned to Children’s Mercy for new scans. Dr. Rivard, Dr. Kaufman and the team went back to the drawing board to find a way to tackle the persistent mass on Braedon’s spine. Together with Braedon and Terrah, the team decided to once again use the trans-oral approach to remove the tumor. 

In March of 2024, Braedon had his third surgery to remove the osteoma. “The post-operative recovery was the worst this time,” Terrah recalled. Finally, a few weeks after the third surgery, “I got my kid back,” she said.

Braedon’s doctors were also glad to see a good outcome at last. “It’s especially gratifying on our end that we got to work together and do something really exceptional,” shared Dr. Rivard. And Dr. Jiang agreed: “It’s like putting a puzzle together. That last piece goes in there, you finally see the whole picture and it’s really amazing to know that each piece was where it was supposed to be.”

While he was relieved to have his pain under control, Braedon was deeply disappointed that many of the sports he loved were no longer safe for him to play due to the risk of injury to his neck. “He was a highly competitive, multi-sport athlete until he wasn’t,” Terrah shared. Baseball is the one sport he can still participate in, so for his senior year, he is shifting all his energy into that. “He’s also found there are other things to be a star at: Boys State, student government and student media at his high school,” Terrah said.

Moving forward

With his painful battle behind him at last, Braedon is looking ahead to his future. After he graduates in 2025, he plans to attend Kansas State University to major in engineering, with a particular focus on the medical side of engineering, such as surgical tools like the ones that helped him. “Dr. Rivard really inspired him to see how many options there are for medicine and research,” said Terrah.

Terrah is relieved to have this difficult journey behind them, too. For other families facing tough medical challenges, she said: “Just don’t quit. Listen to your child, but also reflect on what your goals are. Empower yourself to be the advocate for your child. You have to find the right team, which is why we continue to go to Children’s Mercy. They are the ‘don’t quit’ people!” 

With the creativity, collaboration and connections Braedon’s care team brought to his unique case, the future looks bright for Braedon and many other kids who come to Children’s Mercy for their care. “Kids — even pretty big kids like Braedon — are not just small adults,” said Dr. Jiang. “This case expands the options and techniques that were developed in other age groups and for other indications and adapts them for pediatric use.” The surgical team plans to publish a case report and journal article to help other families who are looking for answers to a challenging medical situation.

“Braedon’s story wasn’t a pretty story,” Terrah said, “but it wasn’t his forever story. That’s what Children’s Mercy did — they never stopped until we got it all.”

Neurosurgery and Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Children's Mercy

Children's Mercy Kansas City Sports Medicine Center 

Through donations and partnerships, Summit Homes plans to build the home as close to zero cost as possible, allowing all proceeds to be donated to Children's Mercy.

“We are so grateful to Summit Homes, and all vendors making this possible, for their commitment to our community and pediatric mental health,” said Rob Steele, Executive Vice President.

The home will be listed for sale in summer 2024 and completed in Fall 2024. This is the second home Summit Homes has built to support Children’s Mercy.

Community champions like Summit Homes and their vendors fuel the Children’s Mercy nonprofit mission to provide excellent care for all children in Kansas City and across the region. Their support powers much-needed life-saving new initiatives, like Illuminate, that will expand mental care access and treatment for youth in Kansas City and beyond.

Many thanks to these Summit Homes for Little Heroes partner vendors:

Shaw Floors, Ferguson Showrooms, Roofs by Aspen, The Rob Ellerman Team, Northcraft Flooring & Design, Stone Creek Midwest, Silverton Mortgage, Shamrock Cabinet, Royal Construction Clean, Premier Building Supply, Timber Ridge Trim Company, Jake Heiser

More information on the Summit Home for Little Heroes

Braden’s Hope for Childhood Cancer held its Hope Connect Annual Research Update on March 21 to celebrate the achievements in childhood cancer research made possible by its donors. Hosted at the Children’s Mercy Research Institute, the event featured Braden’s Hope awards totaling $5.5 million, which includes advancing six collaborative research projects led by teams of investigators from Children’s Mercy Kansas City and the University of Kansas Cancer Center.

Dr. J. Steven Leeder, PharmD, PhD, Interim Executive Director of the Children’s Mercy Research Institute, opened the update by emphasizing the importance of collaborative research funded by Braden’s Hope. 

“Thanks to Braden’s Hope our research projects not only include investigators at Children’s Mercy and KU Cancer Center, but those across the US and Mexico. Today, a total of 13 institutions and 42 researchers are involved in Braden’s Hope research projects,” Dr. Leeder said. “This is important because together we are stronger – thanks to Braden’s Hope, we are able to share our knowledge across multiple institutions – with the goal to bring more hope to kids right here in the Midwest.”

Children’s Mercy is the consortium partner with KU Cancer Center—the region’s only NCI comprehensive cancer center. Comprehensive status is the highest level of recognition awarded by the National Cancer Institute and represents the gold standard for cancer centers.

Braden’s Hope funded projects include:

·       Advancing new treatment options for children and young adults diagnosed with Ewing Sarcoma—led by investigators Terrie Flatt, DO, MA, and Andrew Godwin, PhD

·       Developing targeted therapies for children with a uniquely devastating type of leukemia—led by investigators Erin Guest, MD, John Perry, PhD, and Jay Vivian, PhD

·       Identifying drugs that specifically kill sarcoma cells with one Ewing sarcoma Region 1 gene while sparing normal, healthy cells—led by investigators Tomoo Iwakuma, MD, PhD, and Mizuki Azuma, PhD

·       Understanding how a tumor’s genetic makeup affects its response to T cell therapy—led by Midhat Farooqi, MD, PhD

·       Stimulating the immune system to find and kill cancer stem cells by using a classic chemotherapy drug in a targeted way —led by John Perry, PhD

·       Developing a new compound that kills cancer cells lacking p53, an important tumor suppressor found in the body—led by Tomoo Iwakuma, MD, PhD

As part of the update, Deliece Hofen, President of Braden’s Hope, held a panel discussion with the funded researchers who answered questions about their work. Deliece knows first-hand the importance of advancing research for kids. Her youngest son, Braden, battled childhood cancer three times, starting when he was just three years old. During Braden’s second battle with cancer, he faced the words "no known cure" and his odds for survival were less than 10 percent. 

“Thankfully, my son Braden has defied all odds and is now living cancer-free; however, he lives with many long-term health complications based on the harsh treatment he received at such a young age,” Hofen said. “Our goal at Braden's Hope, is for all families to receive the best, cutting-edge treatment available, without having to leave Kansas City. We want to give children and families diagnosed with cancer, hope for a future because no family should ever have to hear the words: no known cure.” 

Children's Mercy Research Institute

Every day, dozens of children come to the Emergency Department at Children’s Mercy due to a behavioral health crisis. Children like Elizabeth. Elizabeth was diagnosed with ADHD and anxiety as an elementary school student, but her conditions were exasperated by the pandemic and a spiraling crisis led to a trip to the Children’s Mercy emergency room, except there was a problem – there were no hospital beds available for intensive inpatient treatment in a 150-mile radius of Kansas City. Elizabeth finally got the care she needed, and today she is a vibrant high school freshman. But her story reminds us why each aspect of our comprehensive mental health plan is critical for our community’s children. Watch Elizabeth’s full story.

Your donations can go twice as far to help kids like Elizabeth. All gifts received on Giving Tuesday will be matched $1 for $1 until we reach $100,000.

Join us today to double your impact! 

Children’s Mercy formally invested five endowed faculty positions in the fields of healthy lifestyles, clinical pharmacology, neurology, surgery and developmental and behavioral health at the Fall 2023 Investiture Ceremony on Tuesday, October 24, 2023.

The Children’s Mercy Research Institute was the perfect setting to celebrate the elevation of this esteemed group of clinicians, researchers and leaders to academic medicine’s highest achievement and the generous donors who made these endowed positions possible.

Philanthropy has powered the hospital, treatment and cures for children for more than 125 years. Thanks to our philanthropic community, Children’s Mercy has more than doubled its total number of endowed chairs - bringing more answers to children and families when they need them most!

“Through extraordinary donor investment, endowed positions provide ongoing financial support to advance excellence in pediatric medicine, research and teaching, while elevating the academic profile of Children’s Mercy and its stature as a national leader,” said Paul Kempinski, Children’s Mercy President and CEO, Alice Berry, DDS, and Katharine Berry, MD, Endowed Chair in Executive Leadership. “The impact: best-in-class experts and care for children and families who call Kansas City and our region home.”

Honorees

Sarah E. Hampl, MD

Kemper Endowed Professorship for Healthy Lifestyles

Bridgette L. Jones, MD, MSCR

Marion Merrell Dow/Missouri Endowed Chair in Pediatric Clinical Pharmacology

Jean-Baptiste Le Pichon, MD, PhD, FAAP

Madison Lauren Sargent Endowed Professorship in Neurology/Angelman Syndrome

Tolulope A. Oyetunji, MD, MPH, FACS, FAAP

Thomas Holder/Keith Ashcraft Chair in Pediatric Surgical Research

 Shayla A. Sullivant, MD

Joy and Stewart Koesten Endowed Professorship in Developmental and Behavioral Health

Learn more about the honorees and donors

Thank you to the Kemper Family Foundations, UMB Bank, n.a. Trustee, the Marion Merrell Dow Foundation, Fred Lyons, Ed Connolly, Patrick and Laura Sargent, Maddie’s Mission Foundation, The Shaw Family Foundation, Thomas Holder and Keith Ashcraft, and Joy and Stewart Koesten for their visionary leadership and generosity in establishing these vital positions for the continued work of building a world of well-being for all children.

The Children’s Mercy Research Institute was the perfect setting to celebrate the elevation of this esteemed group of clinicians, researchers and leaders to academic medicine’s highest achievement and the generous donors who made these endowed positions possible.

Philanthropy has powered the hospital, treatment and cures for children for more than 125 years. Thanks to our philanthropic community, Children’s Mercy has more than doubled its total number of endowed chairs - bringing more answers to children and families when they need them most!

“Through extraordinary donor investment, endowed positions provide ongoing financial support to advance excellence in pediatric medicine, research and teaching, while elevating the academic profile of Children’s Mercy and its stature as a national leader,” said Paul Kempinski, Children’s Mercy President and CEO, Alice Berry, DDS, and Katharine Berry, MD, Endowed Chair in Executive Leadership. “The impact: best-in-class experts and care for children and families who call Kansas City and our region home.”

Honorees

Aliessa P. Barnes, MD

The Melva and Randall L. O’Donnell Chair in Pediatric Cardiology

Steven Olsen, MD

Swatek Family Endowed Chair in Neonatology

Jon Wagner, DO

Matson Family Endowed Professorship in Cardiology Research

Norman Y. Otsuka, MD, MSc, FRCSC, FAAP, FACS, FAOA

Dr. Brad and Dawn Olney Chair in Pediatric Orthopaedic Surgery

Rangaraj Selvarangan, PhD, BVSc, D(ABMM), FIDSA, F(AAM)

William R. Brown/Missouri Endowed Chair in Medical Genetics and Molecular Medicine

To learn more about the honorees and donors, please visit 2023 Investiture Ceremony (office.com).

Thank you to Dr. Randall and Melva O’Donnell, Ken and Mary Matson, Steve and Kathy Swatek, Dr. Brad and Dawn Olney, and William R. Brown for their visionary leadership and generosity in establishing these vital positions for the continued work of building a world of well-being for all children.

From its humble beginnings in 1897 with just one bed, the hospital has grown to 390 inpatient beds and 16 locations. It had 14,345 pediatric admissions in 2022—60% of them for patients less than 10 years old—who traveled to the hospital with their families from all 50 US states.

Children’s Mercy also pursues leading-edge research. In 2015, it established the Children’s Mercy Research Institute, founded and led by Tom Curran, PhD, FRS, Senior Vice President, Executive Director, Chief Scientific Officer, and Donald J. Hall Eminent Scholar in Pediatric Research. The Institute supports the launch of ambitious initiatives like Genomic Answers for Kids (GA4K), headed by Tomi Pastinen, MD, PhD, Dee Lyons/Missouri Endowed Chair in Pediatric Genomic Medicine.

The program’s goal is to sequence 30,000 children and their parents, and it just passed the milestone of providing more than 1,000 rare disease diagnoses to families; it largely addresses cases of rare genetic disease, but, as Farooqi points out, “Pediatric cancer is also a rare disease,” and the program is enrolling cancer patients as well.

Currently, the hospital is conducting 137 studies and trials—49 of which are in oncology—and developing databases that are crucial for research. In 2017, Erin Guest, MD, Director of the Children’s Mercy Cancer Genomics Program, and Alexander Kats, MD, Director of Nephropathology and Transplantation Pathology Services, set up a pediatric oncology biobank for storing both solid tumor and leukemic samples. This biobank is now part of the Research Institute’s CAP-accredited Biorepository, which is overseen by John David Nolen, MD, PhD, Chair of the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.

To date, over 500 patients have enrolled and Farooqi and his team have performed whole-genome and whole-exome sequencing on 200 of them. Children’s Mercy, which is the pediatric consortium partner of The University of Kansas Cancer Center, was awarded a grant from the National Cancer Institute to share this genomic data as part of the Childhood Cancer Data Initiative. Farooqi explains, “Collecting and sharing data nationally and beyond is really important for pediatric cancer because the numbers are low—it can take a few years for the university to register a dozen children with a single tumor type, whereas for adults, let’s say, the same number of cases could be accrued within a month. If we all work together, we can amass higher numbers of rare tumor types within pediatrics as well.”

Read the full article via Illumina

Children's Mercy Kansas City Research Institute

Research Areas

Four-year-old Maddie loves cheese and fruit snack gummies, being right in the middle of the action, and playing with her twin sister, Kellie, and older brother, Colin. When she was diagnosed with Angelman syndrome, it changed the course of her family’s life forever, setting them on the path to help launch the area’s first Angelman Syndrome Clinic at Children’s Mercy.  

“She is the happiest kid you’ll probably ever meet,” said her dad, Patrick Sargent. “The smiles she exudes is what gives everybody their energy to get through a lot of the hard stuff.”  

 What is Angelman Syndrome? 

Named after the physician who discovered the disorder, Angelman syndrome is a rare genetic disorder caused by a mutation in the UBE3A gene on the 15^th chromosome. Children with Angelman syndrome are known for their generally positive demeanors. They also have developmental delays, trouble with movement and balance, and speech impairments. Many experience seizures and a wide range of other symptoms and complications.  

“Maddie is nonverbal, but she’s incredibly communicative,” said her mom, Laura Sargent. “Her physical development has been really impacted by where her deletion is. We were told she likely wouldn’t walk. She walked! She’s starting to climb stairs.”   

After her diagnosis at Children’s Mercy in January 2020, Maddie’s family went to Chicago and Boston to seek out Angelman syndrome specialists. Over the years, they’ve developed “an army of caretakers.” Laura, a pediatric nurse practitioner who formerly worked at Children’s Mercy, has been instrumental in seeking out the best treatment for Maddie and navigating the insurance labyrinth.  

“Having a background in health care has been immensely helpful,” said Laura. Maddie currently attends a therapeutic pre-school five days a week; has physical, speech and occupational therapy three days a week; aquatic therapy twice a week; and one-on-one Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) therapy in-home. Despite being happy with the specialist care they were receiving out-of-state, they were longing for expert help closer to home.  

“Maddie was hospitalized at Children’s Mercy in July of 2021,” Laura said. “While we had these wonderful specialists in Denver and Boston that could be a phone call away, they weren’t in the hospital. When Maddie needs emergent care, I can’t pick her up and take her to Boston. I can’t take her to Denver. I needed somebody at Children’s Mercy.” 

Patrick agreed, adding that even getting to regular annual appointments was challenging enough.  

“It’s not easy to travel with special needs kids, especially when you’re taking a 3+ hour flight or 8+ hour drive,” Patrick said. “Logistically, it’s tough.”  

The Sargents began meeting other Angelman families in the area and found many didn’t have the resources to travel to specialists or were struggling with the insurance process. “In some cases, their kids just weren’t getting care, and that’s heartbreaking,” said Patrick.  

The Sargents wanted more for Maddie, and they wanted more for her peers in the area. So they decided to do something about it: explore starting an Angelman Syndrome Clinic at Children’s Mercy. 

 Collaborating for Better Care 

The Sargents started a nonprofit, Maddie’s Mission, and held a block-party fundraiser. They met with Diane and Terry Gallagher, whose daughter, Elizabeth, also had Angelman syndrome, to discuss their shared passion for supporting care and research. They talked to their contacts at the Angelman Syndrome Foundation.  

Meanwhile, the Children’s Mercy Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO) was doing its own research, confirming the need for an Angelman syndrome clinic in the area. There was indeed a big gap in coverage: families with the means were traveling all day to get to specialty clinics; families without were making do. Children’s Mercy was already on a path to creating a solution and philanthropic support could accelerate making it happen….a win-win situation!     

Gifts from the Sargents, Maddie’s Mission, the Gallaghers, and the Angelman Syndrome Foundation created funds, including one that is endowed, to support a new Angelman Syndrome Clinic and Angelman syndrome research efforts. (If Angelman syndrome is cured in the future, the funds will shift to support other neurology and rare disease needs.)  

“The passion of the Sargent Family has been extremely moving. The impact their caring philanthropy will have on patients and families visiting the Angelman Syndrome Clinic and seeking research-based answers is astounding,” said Kate Migneron, Director, Philanthropic Giving. “In addition to the funds for the clinic, having an endowed fund means it will live at Children’s Mercy forever and says we’re going to have this care here for the long run. That means a lot to patients and their families.” 

 “A True Partnership” 

J.B. Le Pichon, MD, PhD, FAAP, Professor of Neurology, has made collaboration a priority in his career, working with Nigerian physicians on research and partnering with community physicians and families to bring epilepsy care to rural areas of Kansas through Project REACT.  

“I’m really interested in these types of partnerships where it’s not purely physician driven,” said Dr. Le Pichon. “There is a true commitment, and everybody’s involved.”  

Based on families’ needs, The Angelman Syndrome Clinic at Children’s Mercy is designed to be a medical home for area patients and a hub for innovative new research on the disease.  

“A medical home is where all of the child’s needs are addressed,” said Dr. Le Pichon. “You see the child as a whole. That’s really important for children with Angelman syndrome because their needs are so broad.” 

The monthly, half-day clinic is based in Neurology and hosts 17 patients already. Every patient is seen by Dr. Le Pichon, and the clinic coordinates visits to participating subspecialties (Genetics, Nutrition, Gastroenterology, Orthopedics, Speech and Language Pathology, Developmental and Behavioral Health, and Physical and Occupational Therapy) according to each child’s needs.  

“Every child who enters the clinic will be offered the option of participating in a research study,” said Dr. Le Pichon. In addition to Children’s Mercy Research Institute’s Genomic Answers for Kids study and an effort to study Angelman syndrome’s phenotype expression based on genotype, Dr. Le Pichon has identified several therapeutic studies that he and the clinic’s Patient Family Advisory Council will review for potential integration.   

“Parents are going to have a real say in terms of what [research we pursue],” said Dr. Le Pichon. “I'll be presenting to them, and then we’ll be making the decision together.” 

 Hope for the Future 

Other institutions are conducting promising research on Angelman syndrome, and the Children’s Mercy Research Institute is eager to join the effort.  

“I think we have the potential to become a center of excellence for Angelman syndrome,” said Dr. Le Pichon, agreeing. “In order for that to happen, we are planning to develop some solid research through the CMRI.” 

Patrick echoed them, saying that there is hope for a cure one day. “Access to research is a game-changer not just for us, but for families in Omaha, Des Moines, Arkansas, all of Kansas, all of Missouri.” 

Being able to participate in innovative studies is just one aspect of the well-rounded care the clinic provides. Young people with Angelman syndrome now have a home at Children’s Mercy, where they can get expert, holistic, consistent care. “And be home for dinner right after your appointment!” Patrick said.   

“I hope that all the kids that have Angelman syndrome in the region have access to the same level of care that Maddie has,” said Laura. “We would love everyone to have equal access.”  

Angelman Syndrome Clinic at Children's Mercy

The national crisis in children’s mental and behavioral health has caused a rise in admissions at Children’s Mercy Kansas City in those patient populations, leading to increased escalations and more frequent and severe staff injuries. In response, the hospital created an improvement team and launched a 90-day sprint to address the growing problems. The initiative achieved substantial reductions in staff injuries, patient self-harm, and the use of restraints with behavioral health patients.

The initiative was based on the Rapid Results framework, a method for getting results in under 100 days. Children’s Mercy set three goals:

• Reduce the total use of pharmacological and physical restraints by 25%.
• Reduce the risk for self-harm in patients with suicidal or homicidal ideation by 20%.
• Reduce reported physical staff injuries related to behavioral health patients by 30%.

The goals were executed by three workgroups within the behavioral health rapid improvement team (BHRIT) focused on specific areas: patient cohorting and unit staffing, staff education and training, and staff support. The workgroups were led by a doctor/nurse dyad leadership structure and supported by an administrative sponsor. BHRIT overall was also supported by an executive sponsor, a coach and a communications and marketing specialist. The team represented a variety of disciplines and levels of staff, including nursing, social work, regulatory, child life, psychology, psychiatry, local leaders and frontline staff.

Read the full article via the Children's Hospital Association

Developmental and Behavioral Health at Children's Mercy

Mental Health Resources

On the podcast, Melanie and Bailey explain the roles they play as facility dog program coordinators at Children’s Mercy. They also speak in detail about the program, and how the facility dogs are implemented into patient care.

Hear the podcast via Rosie Fund

Children's Mercy Facility Dog Program

Michelle Wimes, JD, SVP/Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, has been named the recipient of the inaugural Tulane University Law School Deans Kramer & Clayton Award for Leadership in Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

The award was created to recognize exemplary impact in advancing the cause of access and inclusion in the legal profession. The Tulane Law announcement describes Michelle as, “A nationally recognized expert on professional development, diversity and inclusion in the workplace.”

Michelle became the first Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at Children’s Mercy Kansas City in 2020. She leads the DEI efforts of the hospital's 9,000-employee base over 18 locations. In less than two years, she has conducted the hospital system's first Diversity Workforce Assessment, developed CM’s inaugural DEI Strategic Plan, and developed innovative health equity initiatives to address homelessness, food insecurity, and anti-racism in Kansas City. Michelle continues to be an active leader at Tulane and other institutions as a mentor to law and medical students and as a leader in innovative pipeline and pathway programs to open both the fields of law and medicine to underrepresented students.

Prior to joining Children's Mercy, Michelle worked for 14 years in three AmLaw 100 firms, practicing all aspects of employment litigation, and serving as an equity partner at a Kansas City-based firm. She focused on matters involving employment discrimination, harassment, and civil rights issues while representing clients before administrative agencies and courts.

Michelle will receive the award on Feb. 5 at the Tulane Black Law Alumni Reunion at Tulane University’s Yulman Stadium in New Orleans.

The award is named in honor of John Kramer and Robert Clayton, whose passionate leadership in the cause of racial equity and justice helped to transform Tulane Law School. Dean Kramer was Tulane Law School’s 19th Dean and served from 1986 to 1996; Kramer recruited Robert Clayton to serve as Assistant Dean of the Law School and the founding director of Tulane Law’s pioneering Minority Access Program.

“We know anorexia nervosa is one of the deadliest mental health conditions a person can have, and we also know that interventions tend to work best in youth,” said Kelsie Forbush, professor of clinical child psychology and director of the Center for the Advancement of Research on Eating Disorders (CARE) and the Center for Overcoming Problem Eating (COPE) at KU.

To improve outcomes and improve access to care for adolescents in this window of vulnerability to relapse, Forbush is leading a three-year clinical trial by researchers at the University of Kansas and Children’s Mercy Kansas City to assess a suite of new digital mHealth tools, dubbed Smart Treatment for Anorexia Recovery, or STAR.

The STAR intervention, developed by Forbush and her collaborators, will assist outpatient community therapists by providing them with support tools to assess and treat clients ages 13-21 during this post-acute treatment window. The randomized controlled trial will enroll 129 participants with AN and AN-related conditions (such as atypical anorexia nervosa, where AN traits are present but a body-mass index measure might be too high for a classic AN diagnosis). A pilot trial of usability and acceptability, already underway, is showing positive results.

Their work is supported by a new $700,000 award from the National Institutes of Health. Centers involved in this network include McCallum Place – Kansas City and St. Louis, InSight, Children’s Mercy Eating Disorders Center and the Eating Recovery Center in Denver.

“The majority of teens coming home from residential care are returning to communities without eating disorder specialists,” said co-primary investigator Sara Gould, director of the Eating Disorders Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. “This project has the potential to hugely increase access to proven interventions and to track teens’ response to the intervention."

Read the full release via The University of Kansas

Match Your Giving $1 for $1

Today is Giving Tuesday! For anyone considering making a financial donation to Children’s Mercy, this is a great time to give because your gift will go twice as far. For a limited time, The Jackson Family, The Roark Family Foundation and a group of our community champions are matching all gifts up to $188,000 until Dec. 31.

Give today: childrensmercy.org/helpkids

Gifts of Clothing, Snacks and Toys 

“To relieve some of the stress families and staff are experiencing, your generosity ensures every child spending the holiday season in the hospital will receive a gift and comfort items, making their stay a little easier and allowing all to focus on what matters most – bringing hope and healing to the thousands of children we serve each and every day.” said Jenea Oliver, Chief Development Officer.  

In lieu of hosting an in-person gift drive, rally your friends, neighbors and families by creating an online virtual toy drive fundraising page. You can set up a page, select a fundraising goal and invite your friends, family and colleagues to join you. All proceeds are used to purchase our most needed items―toys, games, snacks, clothing, crafts and more.

Give Backs Around Our Community

Purchase an Item     

Charlie Hustle will be selling a Giving Tuesday Communi-Tee and DEMDACO is selling Giving Bears with a percent of proceeds benefiting Children’s Mercy. Both are great gift options for others or a way to treat yourself while giving back! 

Experiences

Visit holiday drive-through experiences Winter Magic in Historic Cliff Drive and Holiday Light and Magic in Wyandotte Park to enjoy winter wonderland with your family and friends - plus, support patients and families by adding a donation to Children's Mercy at checkout.

Heading to Crown Center this holiday season? Stop by the Giving Machine near the ice terrace and select an item to donate to Children’s Mercy through the red giving vending machine.

We invite you to join our Community of Champions in a variety of ways! Whether your gift helps provide a diagnosis that wasn’t available yesterday through cutting-edge research, trains a new nurse, or provides a cozy blanket to a sick child, giving to Children’s Mercy helps families when they need it most.

Learn more: www.childrensmercy.org/give

Thank you for Dreaming Big with us! Last Saturday, more than 2,000 friends joined together at Crown Center Square for the first time in-person to celebrate hope and healing with Children’s Mercy at Dream Big Day.

Participants celebrated with a 1-mile walk to the Field of Dreams in Hospital Hill Park in front of the Children’s Mercy Research Institute, where attendees shared their dreams for kids in a unique art display. After the walk, kids, families and friends enjoyed free family-fun activities, such as face painting, balloon artists, a silent disco, a drum safari, and much more at the Dream Big Family Fest. A highlight were 10 reunions where more than 800 patient families had the opportunity to interact with their former physicians, nurses, care teams and each other!

“The Children’s Mercy Heart Center team had the most amazing time reconnecting with our patients and their family members! It’s such a joy to be able to see our patients outside of the hospital setting, enjoying time with their family and having fun engaging in new experiences like Dream Big Day!  We are really looking forward to next year’s event,” said Erin Perez, LCSW, Heart Center Thrive Program Manager.

Check out the Dream Big Day video and photo album for a peek at the event if you weren’t able to join.

Together, 165 teams raised $255,000 for Children’s Mercy to ensure kids are healthy to chase their big dreams! 

Special thanks to our sponsors for dreaming big for kids: Crown Center, Ameristar Casino Kansas City, Anthony Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electric, Compass Minerals International,  Constance M. Cooper Charitable Foundation, Hallmark Cards, Inc., The Perry Family, The Jackson Family, Kiewit, American Century Investments, The Anderson's Inc., Dean Coughenour Trust, Evans Evco and Kansas City Parks & Rec.

Thank you to all who joined us to help provide hope, cures, and answers for kids in Kansas City and beyond!

“We are excited to see research and the potential for innovation come to fruition locally, as well as the ability to have a hand in it. We look forward to providing researchers an alternative outlet for funding for future endeavors together!” – Tim and Elizabeth Chilcote, Mercy Research Partners donors

During the event on June 9, six researchers pitched their projects with the hopes of receiving funding. At the end of the evening, the Members voted to select four research projects to receive funding from their 2022 investment pool of nearly $630,000.

“It was such a privilege to take part in this funding process. The four winning projects will change lives, we have no doubt.” – Marc Radasky and Cary Randolph Fuller, Mercy Research Partners donors

This innovative model allows donors to connect with and fund research in a new way and brings Children’s Mercy researchers face-to-face with potential funders for coaching and investment.

Congratulations to this year’s winning pitches:

Todd Bradley, PhD – Immunogenomics

Respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) infections in children under 5 years old leads to 2.1 million doctor visits, and 58,000 kids are hospitalized as a result of severe disease each year in the United States. Unfortunately, RSV causes 100-500 deaths in children under the age of 5-years-old each year. There is no current vaccine to prevent RSV infection approved for use, and there are no targeted antivirals for use during RSV infection. Dr. Bradley is harnessing the antiviral power of breast milk and mRNA technology to develop RSV therapeutics for children and adults which will not only save lives, but lower costs associated with long hospital stays.

Susana Chavez-Bueno, MD - Infectious Diseases and Rachel, Gastroenterology

Countless newborn babies across the globe suffer from blood stream infections that place their lives at risk. The pathogens that cause these infections typically reach the baby through the genital tract of the mothers. There are currently few options to prevent these infections; however, Dr. Chavez-Bueno and Dr. Chevalier believe they have discovered a new therapeutic strategy to help  prevent infections with a common bacterium responsible for these infections, Escherichia coli.

Emily Farrow, PhD, CGC – Genomic Medicine Center

One of the most common conditions in infancy, congenital hypotonia, occurs in 0.8/1,000 births and yet presents substantial testing challenges in newborns. Hypotonia itself is a non-specific finding and may be due to numerous underlying conditions, including metabolic, endocrine, genetic, acute illness, or hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, complicating a timely diagnosis. Dr. Farrow and her team have established diagnostic signatures for some of the most challenging DNA variants causing hypotonia to improve diagnoses for families.

Jay Vivian, PhD – Clinical Genetics

Vici Syndrome is a devastating genetic disorder that often robs children from making it to their 5^th birthday. At present, there are no treatment options for these children. A team led by Dr. Vivian is studying the effectiveness of drugs identified in his lab, in the hopes of accelerating the identification of treatment options for children with Vici syndrome and other deadly rare diseases.    

Learn more about how philanthropic support is impacting groundbreaking research at our new Children’s Mercy Research Institute 

Two Children’s Mercy Sports Medicine Center athletic trainers assigned to Sporting Kansas City Academy, Karan Padmakumar, MS, LAT, ATC, and Payton Jensen, ATC, LAT, CSCS, were both working on Victory Field.

Karan was in the medical tent while Payton was with the Academy’s U14 team as they battled Nashville’s club. The second half of the match was just beginning. Referee Mark Kinch, a staple at Academy matches for the past several years, prepared to blow the whistle to signal the start of play. He took a couple steps and then fell face forward.

Jorge Santana, athletic trainer for the Nashville side, was first to reach Mark. Payton joined him seconds later.

“When we arrived, he was actively seizing,” said Payton.

He and Jorge rolled him onto his side, stabilized his head and signaled to Karan and other staff to contact Emergency Medical Services. Mark continued to seize for five or six minutes. Payton and Jorge monitored his pulse and began CPR when he lost pulse and became cyanotic.

“We opened the airway and started compressions,” said Payton. “Luckily we had an AED onsite.”

Karan had seen Mark fall from a distance and ran over with the automated external defibrillator (AED), which is standard medical equipment for Sporting Academy but not often on-hand at other youth soccer clubs around the country.

As Payton and Jorge began setting up the AED, Karan began calling 911 and started implementing their emergency action plan (EAP), including removing players from visibility and opening gates so EMS could arrive quickly. Another Children’s Mercy employee, Lisa Wedel (MS, APRN, CPNP-PC), was on site because she’s an Academy host parent. She ran to help and was instrumental in getting Mark the care he needed.

“That emergency action plan is standard for [Sporting Kansas City Academy] but not for everyone,” said Karan. “That’s the message we want to get across: These things we had set in place really made a difference.”

Payton agreed. “It’s not only having the plan, but everyone knowing what to do,” he said. “Having a team that is cohesive and who knows their roles is super important in an emergency situation.”

Payton and Jorge went through three cycles of CPR and administered one shock before EMS arrived. Karan met the truck as it arrived and debriefed them on Mark’s condition.

“Once they came, EMS took over the situation. We were able to inform them of everything that we’d already done,” Payton said. “When I explain it, it sounds like it happened in the blink of an eye, but it felt much longer when in the situation.”

“Time just disappears when you’re in a situation like that,” Karan agreed.

“This was so well controlled,” said Lisa. “No one panicked. Karan and Payton acted like they had run this scenario a thousand times. I was so incredibly impressed with Karan, Payton, and all of the SKC Academy staff involved with how they worked together to get Mark the help he so clearly needed.”

Karan and Payton worked with the Academy’s referee assigner to track down Mark’s emergency contacts, so his loved ones could meet him at the hospital. Mark's family kept Karan and Payton updated on his condition in the days that followed.

“The first thing I remember is waking up in a hospital room around 4 p.m. the next day,” said Mark. “It still feels pretty surreal.”

Mark’s family has some history of heart disease, but he had no warning signs before his heart attack. He had worked from home earlier that day, then arrived early for the 5 p.m. match feeling normal and ready to ref. He is especially grateful that the cardiac event happened on the field with professionals with medical training nearby.

“With me working remotely, if it had happened at home, I wouldn’t be talking to you,” Mark said.

Mark said he’s going to pay much more attention to what on-site medical care is available at games in the future. He’s seen his share of broken bones and concussions on the pitch, but never a health event like what he experienced.

“Part of my annual [referee] recertification is safe sport training,” Mark shared. “Some of that is recognizing the signs of cardiac arrest. I never imagined I’d be witnessing it—or be the one it happened to.” 

Many people don’t realize the breadth of knowledge athletic trainers possess, including being able to provide emergency care. From injury evaluation to rehabilitation to being the liaison between players and other medical providers, athletic trainers are on the front lines of sports medicine. While traveling, athletic trainers are doing everything from monitoring players’ colds to making sure kids with allergies are getting the medicine they need.

“Every aspect of healthcare you can think of for these kids, we’re touching in some way,” Karan explained.

Athletic trainers must go through accredited programs and most hold master’s degrees; all are board certified and state licensed.

“We serve as a primary healthcare professional for these athletes, 24/7,” said Karan. “We are there for every practice, every game...we’re trained in emergency care to ensure that in an emergency like this, there’s a trained professional around.”

Mark’s doctors told him that fast thinking and immediate action by Karan, Payton, Jorge and others not only saved his life but protected him from brain damage. Mark is now out of the hospital, resting and beginning cardiac rehab. He would like to return to refereeing after his recovery is complete.

“I’m very, very grateful for their quick response,” said Mark. “The fact that I’m still here is because of them.”

“Our athletic trainers are incredibly skilled health care professionals who perform an invaluable service in the community,” said Dr. Kevin Latz, Chief, Section of Sports Medicine. “Their skill set is often under appreciated. We are blessed to have Payton and Karan representing Children’s Mercy Hospital.”

Children's Mercy Sports Medicine Center

Kansas City Chief Orlando Brown Jr. knows personally the devastation Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) can have on individuals and families, and on Monday, June 20 he came to Children’s Mercy Kansas City to have blood drawn to enroll in a study designed to slow and prevent progression of the disease.

“My brother was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes in fifth grade, my father passed from ketoacidosis, and both of my dad’s parents passed from diabetes as well, so this is a cause that hits home for me,” Brown said. “I think it’s very important to raise awareness.”

Relatives of people with T1D are 15 times more likely to develop the disease. Orlando’s father, who also played in the National Football League, died at age 40 from diabetic ketoacidosis, never knowing he had the disease. Orlando, now himself the father of a young son, said, “I worry about him and his safety, and I want to be here a long time to continue to watch him grow.”

Children’s Mercy is one of 26 T1D clinical centers for TrialNet, an international study that screens high-risk individuals learn more about how T1D develops and explore ways to prevent. Orlando’s blood will be analyzed and become part of the study’s research data base.

TrialNet study testing criteria is based on familial relationship. To qualify for screening, candidates must:

 ·       Have a first-degree relative (mom, dad, sibling) living with T1D and be 2.5 to 45 years old, or

 ·       Have a second-degree relative (uncle, aunt, cousin) living with T1D and be 2.5 to 20 years old.

Screening for risk of developing T1D is accomplished through a simple venous blood sample when collected in-person. If a participant conducts the blood test at home, they receive a finger-poke to be collected and sent through the mail. CM will test anyone who meets the criteria above.

“Our goal is a future without T1D,” Dr. Mark Clements, Children’s Mercy Pediatric Endocrinologist said. “This is a global disease, affecting children and adults alike. It’s a disease that requires an incredible burden of self-care, with glucose monitoring and insulin doses multiple times a day. Our goal in TrialNet is to see if we can develop new medication that can help reduce the burden for individuals living with it, for their family members who are at risk and for the entire community.”

Brown said his hope is to inspire others, “For those that are eligible, I hope you’ll enroll in the study by getting your blood drawn - it really was easy - or join me by donating to Children’s Mercy to further this important research.” 

To learn more about the study visit: Children’s Mercy Type 1 Diabetes TrialNet.

To donate visit: support.childrensmercy.org/KC57.

Six years ago, Sydney Parker was a healthy 15-year-old sophomore who loved softball when a severe case of pneumonia sent her to the hospital.

She had been sick at home for a week, and despite taking antibiotics, she was getting worse. Finally, her father took her to Children’s Mercy Hospital Kansas. Soon after, she was admitted to Adele Hall, where she was transferred to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) with respiratory failure. “I remember going in the ambulance,” said Sydney. “I remember that night, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, I felt like I ran really fast and couldn’t catch my breath.”

Her condition worsened, with fluid filling her lungs. She was intubated and put on a ventilator. She remembers marveling at how carefully the nurses watched over her.

“You have these people who show up, they don’t know you, but they are trying to save your life, putting your physical needs before their own.” She recalled the night several days after she was admitted when a nurse noticed she was becoming anxious and breathing heavily. “The nurse was very observant – she made a call and within a minute all these people came in,” she said of the doctors, respiratory therapists, and pharmacists that came to help her. She remembers them needing to sedate her so that she would stop fighting the ventilator.

Sydney was experiencing a severe inflammatory response that was preventing her from getting better. After that, the decision was made to put Sydney on Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation, or ECMO.

CM’s ECMO program provides long-term breathing and heart support for children with life-threatening heart or lung problems. It’s considered the highest form of life support and can be used for days or weeks while the underlying illness is treated. She was on ECMO for about five days while her body worked to heal.   

While her time on ECMO was a blur, she does remember the time afterward in the hospital as she recovered. “There was always a nurse with me, just talking about life outside the hospital to take my mind off things,” she said. “They were taking such good care of me.”

19 days after she was admitted, Sydney went home. It took another week before she returned to school and a lot of homework to catch up on. She was in physical therapy often to help her recover and had to slowly work back to softball.

“The nurses and physical therapists were really nice and encouraging,” she said, adding that the whole experience made her realize how much she took her physical mobility for granted. “I didn’t realize how sick I was,” she said.

When she returned to school, classmates asked if the experience made her want to be a nurse. It was sophomore year, and many students were exploring career options. Her first thought was that nursing was too hard. Not necessarily the work itself, but the emotional aspect that comes with taking care of other people. She thought of the little boy that had been in the room next to her in the PICU. He was only three years old and had been in a house fire and lost some of his family. “I was so concerned for him and his family,” she said, remembering that at the time, she thought she could never do what nurses do.

But something changed.

When it was finally time to decide on a career, Sydney did consider nursing as well as journalism or education, but wasn’t sure what to do. One evening, she prayed about it to help her decide. Shortly after, her mom brought up Sydney’s ECMO experience, seemingly out of the blue. Sydney took it at a sign. “That’s when I decided that I’m definitely going to be a nurse,” she said.

While attending college at the University of Kansas, she received her Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) and worked in a nursing home. After moving back to Kansas City for nursing school, she continued her CNA work at Providence Medical Center and then St. Luke’s Hospital. “I loved all of those experiences,” she said, adding that they helped solidify her decision to pursue nursing.

She wanted to keep her options open, but the more she moved into her career, the more she realized her interest was in children and critical care.

For her clinical experience, Sydney had to choose a certification or specialty and write about it. She ended up at Children’s Mercy doing her project on ECMO. While walking through the halls and speaking with her instructor, she was approached by Kari Davidson, Director of the ECMO Program. She asked Sydney for her name and when she told her, Kari stepped back and took a softball swing. To Sydney’s surprise, Kari not only remembered her being a patient on ECMO but had used her case in training and had a photo of Sydney playing softball in the training presentation. The rest of the day, Kari would introduce Sydney and ask staff if they remembered her.

“It’s been six years, I didn’t expect them to remember me,” said Sydney, adding that seeing the staff so happy to see her made it a “full circle” moment for her, and showed her how rewarding it is for nurses to see a patient fully recovered and healthy. “It made me want to work at Children’s Mercy because that’s the environment that meant so much to me and my family,” she said. “There’s something really special going on here.”

Sydney will start working at Children’s Mercy next month in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU). She’s excited to start there, and already has some experience working in the NICU for her capstone program at KU. “I think I have a passion for caring for those that are most vulnerable,” she said, adding that she hopes that her experience on ECMO will help to provide encouragement and hope to not only patients, but families as well.

Read other employee stories in celebration of Children's Mercy 125th anniversary. 

Hospital leaders and special guests gathered to recognize the distinguished accomplishments of the following Children’s Mercy faculty and the donors who made these endowed positions possible at the 2022 Investiture ceremony on Wednesday, April 13.

Denise Bratcher, DO

Dr. Sidney F. Pakula Endowed Chair in Graduate Medical Education 

Mark A. Clements, MD, PhD, CPI, FAAP

Rick and Cathy Baier Family Endowed Chair in Endocrinology

Jeanne M. James, MD, MBA, FAAP

Joyce C. Hall Eminent Scholar in Pediatrics

Eric T. Rush, MD, FAAP, FACMG

Underdown/Yeomans Family Endowed Professorship in Connective Tissue Disorders Care

Venkatesh Sampath, MBBS, MRCPCH

Sosland Chair in Neonatology Research

Sarah E. Soden, MD

Nick Timmons Endowed Chair in Developmental & Behavioral Health

Tangula Taylor, MBA, BSN, RN, NE-BC

Bernell Hevner O’Donnell, RN Endowed Chair – Chief Nursing Officer

“Established through the generosity of committed donors, endowed positions are the highest academic award one can achieve – it is an incredible honor to be the named holder of the appointment and an enduring tribute to the donor who creates it,” Paul Kempinski, Children’s Mercy President and CEO, Alice Berry, DDS, and Katharine Berry, MD, Endowed Chair in Executive Leadership, said. “Now, more than ever, endowed positions are crucial for recruiting and retaining world-class talent – they provide the recipient time and funding to focus on their work – it truly is an investment in the future of children’s health.”

The ongoing financial support endowed positions create for research and education, and numerous other areas, elevates the hospital’s academic profile and stature as a national leader in clinical care. Thank you to Dr. Lawrence Pakula of The Louis H. Gross Foundation, Inc.; Rick and Cathy Baier Family Foundation; The Hall Family Foundation; Kim and Rod Underdown and the Underdown and Yeomans Family; The Sosland Foundation; Fore the Kids Foundation and Dr. Randall and Melva O’Donnell for their visionary leadership and generosity in establishing these vital positions for the continued work of building a world of well-being for all children.

Learn more about the honorees and donors

Shauna’s journey with cancer started when she was just 14 years old. “I was a classic case of someone whose cancer went undetected for several months before I came to Children’s Mercy,” she said.

For Shauna, one of her first symptoms was weight loss. “My mom noticed that my clothes were getting baggy, and I was very tired,” she said. “I was an active kid. I would go to a basketball or volleyball practice that summer, then come home and nap for three or four hours. That wasn’t like me at all.”

When a large bump suddenly appeared on the right side of her neck, Shauna’s parents took her to several doctors who diagnosed her with mononucleosis, a contagious disease commonly caused by the Epstein-Barr virus.

More than mono

Though she was prescribed antibiotics, the bump on her neck had grown to the size of a golf ball, and Shauna was getting sicker by the day.

“I remember waking up in the middle of the night and I would be soaking wet with sweat,” Shauna said. “That was one of the final triggers for my parents that this was more than mono.”

Her concerned parents decided to take Shauna to the Children’s Mercy Hospital Kansas Emergency Services Department where the physician who treated her ordered a chest X-ray.

“As soon as they got the X-ray results, they could see I had a large mass in my chest,” Shauna said. “They sent me to the Hematology/Oncology Clinic at the Adele Hall Campus immediately.”

There, Shauna and her family met with Alan Gamis, MD, pediatric oncologist. Dr. Gamis ordered a biopsy, blood work and other testing. To expedite her care, Shauna had a port-a-catheter placed at the same time the biopsy was performed so she could begin chemotherapy treatments immediately.

“They were pretty sure I had lymphoma, but the biopsy confirmed the type and stage,” Shauna said. A PET scan showed Shauna’s medical team exactly where the cancer was located in her body, and because of the chest mass, she also had a pulmonary function test.

It’s go-time!

With all those tests completed in July 2006, Shauna said it was “go-time.” Dr. Gamis presented a study to Shauna and her family from the Children’s Oncology Group (COG), and she decided to participate.

“The study was looking at whether therapy could be personalized better, giving less to those who didn’t need so much and more to those who did,” Dr. Gamis explained. “One of the primary aspects of the study was to reduce the risk of later breast cancer, which was high in those who received chest radiation. Shauna responded very well to chemotherapy and was randomized to no radiation.

“Her participation, along with hundreds of others, showed we could eliminate radiation in children who had a good, rapid early response to chemotherapy.”

As Shauna began her treatment, Dr. Gamis recalled her as a headstrong individual who wanted to know every detail of the disease she was fighting and the proposed treatment plan. She also had tremendous family support, a key factor when facing a cancer diagnosis.

“Shauna and her family understood that participating in a clinical trial not only could help her but could help other children facing the same diagnosis in the future,” Dr. Gamis said. “By taking part in the trial, Shauna received the best therapy available at the time for newly diagnosed patients with Hodgkin lymphoma.”

Shauna’s treatments were delivered in the Hematology/Oncology Outpatient Clinic, as long as she had no complications. “My protocol was a week of chemotherapy, then three weeks off to recover for the next cycle. I came into the clinic for my first cycle of chemotherapy and ended up being admitted for the rest of that round,” Shauna said.

“I would be pretty sick that first week, then I would feel good by the third week, then the cycle would start all over again,” Shauna described. Over the next six months, Shauna battled fevers, a skin infection, nausea and vomiting, mouth sores, fatigue, severe bone pain and hair loss. But by the end of November, there was good news.

“When treatment ended, I felt pretty good, but my body so weak. I had no strength at all,” she said. Still, Shauna’s scan results showed the treatment not only worked, but that she was in remission.

“At Thanksgiving, my parents announced to our family that the cancer was gone,” Shauna recalled. “There were a lot of happy tears from the adults. I think my parents felt like it was over. They were focused on survival.”

But Shauna was focused on recovery, and the long-term effects of what she’d been through.

“I had to give myself a lot of grace and time to slowly return to normal,” Shauna said. “I had to build my strength back up, and even though I tried to go back to school in January 2007, I could only go part time.

“Plus, in the midst of treatment, my family moved and I changed schools. It was tough being the bald new girl, but eventually I realized I had been through much worse. At some point, I just stopped caring what anyone else thought.”

It’s just a phone call …

Over the next year, Shauna continued her recovery, returning to the hospital every three months for check-ups, blood work and scans.

“I remember waiting for that phone call with the news of my results,” Shauna said. “ It’s crazy because it’s just a phone call, but you can’t eat or sleep without that information. It determines what your life is going to look like. I would be so anxious to get the news.

“For me, hearing that I was in remission was a huge relief, but it was nerve-wracking to know that the cancer could come back at any minute,” Shauna added.

As the months went by, scan after scan confirmed that Shauna was in remission, and she continued to regain her strength. By the summer of 2007, about a year after her diagnosis was made, she began to feel like her old self.

“I started playing basketball again, running track and hanging out with my friends,” Shauna said. “Life felt normal.”

A new direction

Like many teens who experience a life-threatening diagnosis, Shauna began to re-examine her future.  Guided by her strong faith, Shauna said she knew through her cancer diagnosis that God was asking her to do something different with her life.

“From the time I was just a little kid, I loved the weather, and I always thought I would become a meteorologist,” Shauna said. “I was a weather nerd. But after being diagnosed with cancer, I decided I wanted to study nursing, and more specifically, become a pediatric oncology nurse.”

After graduating from high school, Shauna was accepted into the Bachelor of Science in nursing program at Rockhurst University in Kansas City.

Four years later, she graduated with a BSN and a minor in political science. “During my capstone project, I requested to be placed at Children’s Mercy. I did my final practicum in the emergency room, and then was hired right out of school to work on 4 Henson.”

Dreams do come true!

But working with oncology patients at Children’s Mercy wasn’t Shauna’s only dream. She married her college sweetheart, Luke Beckett, shortly after graduating from Rockhurst. And knowing she had always wanted to be a mom, the couple decided to start a family.

“I knew fertility issues could be a long-term concern after the chemotherapy treatments I received, and that I might have a shorter window for my child-bearing years than normal,” Shauna said. “That’s why I decided to become a mom sooner rather than later.”

Though Shauna did experience some challenges with her fertility, she’s overcome those as well, giving birth to two healthy children, 2-year-old Hadley and 4-year-old Corbin.

“These ages are so crazy but so fun,” Shauna said. “I wish they could stay this age forever. We love doing anything outdoors, like hiking and exploring. Even through the pandemic, we would go find an empty trail in Kansas City to hike.”

My Children’s Mercy family

Throughout Shauna’s cancer journey, her Children’s Mercy care team has been at her side. “Dr. Gamis and Joy Bartholomew, his nurse practitioner, are amazing! I cannot imagine a better oncology team in America!

“As a nurse on the floor who has experienced care at Children’s Mercy firsthand and has now seen Dr. Gamis interact with countless patients, he’s the same for everyone. There’s no favorite. He wants to save everyone’s life.”

In fact, Shauna and her family believe that God used Dr. Gamis to save her life. “He was at the right place at the right time. We are so thankful for all he did and we admire him so much.

“The other nurses on the unit don’t have the same personal experience as a patient that I do, so when I hear them say how kind and caring Dr. Gamis is, I just smile. I know that he treats every patient with the same care and respect that he gave me,” Shauna said.

Dr. Gamis said the thirst for knowledge and detail that helped Shauna beat cancer are what make her such an outstanding pediatric oncology nurse today.

“During rounds, Shauna really speaks up and advocates for her patients, providing great insight into how they are doing physically and emotionally,” Dr. Gamis said.

Now that she’s been cancer-free for 15 years, Shauna no longer worries that her next scan might show the cancer is back or that she needs more treatment. “I’ve finally been able to let that go,” she said.

But her involvement in that clinical trial 15 years ago has helped other cancer patients like her. “The treatment Shauna received in the COG trial became the standard of care for newly diagnosed Hodgkin lymphoma patients over the next decade,” Dr. Gamis added.

As a nurse who has helped family after family, she also realizes how much Children’s Mercy does for patients behind the scenes. “When I look back, I can see the bigger picture. The financial department was such a big help to my family. They never could have afforded my medical bills without help. I’ve personally benefited from fundraising efforts like Big Slick,” Shauna said.

“If you work in finance or philanthropy, it would be easy to sometimes think that you’re sitting at a computer, wondering if what you do really makes a difference. I want you to know that it does,” Shauna said.

“I’m so thankful for everything my Children’s Mercy care team did for me, but as an oncology nurse, I know that I have looked after so many kids whose stories don’t turn out like mine. It happens every moment of every day. Some family’s world is crumbling somewhere. That’s hard for me to accept.”

Which is why Shauna is sharing her story now. “I never want to take away from what a family is going through. But I will share my story if I think it will encourage and inspire the patient to fight, to try harder, to lift their head up and to see that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”

“As a patient, Shauna was positive and a great advocate for herself,” Dr. Gamis added. “Her experience provides her with a great compassion and empathy for what our patients and families are going through. I am proud of her every day when I see her taking care of patients. She’s proof that there’s not only life after cancer, but a happy, successful life.”

My story starts a little over nine years ago. My husband and I were so excited for our twins to be born. (We were married for 10 years before we were able to have children.) McKinzie and Hudson were born at 36 weeks, and shortly thereafter we learned Hudson had a heart defect. We had no idea prior to their birth, so it was a heavy blow to take. A Children’s Mercy cardiologist came to Liberty Hospital to assess our son and give us the diagnosis: tetralogy of Fallot. We were devastated, but at least we had hope that this was a defect that could be repaired, and if so, he could live a full life.

Seven months later, we were at Children’s Mercy and Hudson was undergoing open-heart surgery. The surgery was a success, but it wasn’t easy. We had a couple of setbacks, and recovery was a roller-coaster, with good days and hard days. Throughout everything, the staff at Children’s Mercy treated our son as if he were theirs. I believe this is the type of love that Alice Berry Graham and Katharine Berry Richardson had for children when they first started Children’s Mercy, and it continues to this day.

The hospital staff not only make you feel welcome, but a part of the family. Every decision was made with care and love for Hudson so he could get better and thrive. Every single employee has that same goal. They go about it in different ways, as they have different jobs, but they have the same universal goal. I believe it takes a very special type of person to be employed at Children’s Mercy. I have found one common denominator in every employee I meet: LOVE. A person must have love in their heart to be here. It reflects in everything they do, and that is why they’re here – I am certain.

In our two-week stay, I had lots of time to think. Think and watch. While Hudson recovered from surgery, I watched the dynamic, the culture at the hospital. I thought to myself, ‘I HAVE to work here!” But with a degree in merchandising, I thought, “Why would they ever hire me?” I thought I had no chance. I kept thinking about it – I felt like I was supposed to be at Children’s Mercy. I didn’t know how, or why, but I needed to try.

I am so glad I did. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done! Seven years later, I’m the office coordinator of the Respiratory Care department. I love it.

Hudson is a regular, thriving 9-year-old boy who loves to rile up his twin sister. We are so lucky. You know, it’s funny – I grew up here and was aware of Children’s Mercy, but never thought twice of it. I realize now how much of an exceptional gem Children’s Mercy is for Kansas City, and how there is no other place like it in the Heartland. Patients come from near and far to this special place – for healing, for care, and for love. Patients know when they come to Children’s Mercy they’ll get love, and I believe that fact is what will drive us to become the best Children’s Mercy we can be in the future.

Learn more about Children's Mercy Kansas City.

Team Children’s Mercy brings together those who love to run, bike, explore and more, to help fuel the ground-breaking research, world-class care and advanced healthcare delivered to children across the region each and every year.

Athletes from across the Kansas City region and beyond are invited to set up personal fundraising pages and raise funds for kids while they train and race. Join families like Kevin’s who channel their Children’s Mercy experience and give back through race support.

“Children’s Mercy gave our family so much that I want to give back… Team Children’s Mercy represents an opportunity to put our arms around an organization that has their arms around so many families and so many children in our region. And that’s why I support Team Children’s Mercy," said Kevin Wade, a Children’s Mercy parent.

Watch Kevin’s story here

You can also join Team CM by participating in two local races that benefit Children’s Mercy – Burns & McDonnell Rock the Parkway Half Marathon & 5K, and Hospital Hill Run Half Marathon, 10K & 5K.

Your support brings hope, healing, comfort and compassion to kids and families at Children’s Mercy. From art therapy to innovative research and everything in between, your contribution helps us to provide world-class care for all kids in our community.

Burns & McDonnell Rock the Parkway Half Marathon & 5K

April 9, 2022

Show your Children's Mercy pride at the 13th Annual Rock the Parkway and support kids in our community by joining Team Children's Mercy! All donations and fundraising through your participation in Rock the Parkway directly benefit patients and families at Children's Mercy.

Hospital Hill Run Half Marathon, 10K & 5K

June 4, 2022

By taking part in the Hospital Hill Run, a portion of your entry, along with 100% of your fundraising efforts, go to the I Love Children’s Mercy Fund. Make your miles count in 2022 by becoming an individual or team fundraiser. Companies can also activate their employees and compete in the Charity Challenge.

Join Team CM to race for kids who are racing against the clock!

There’s a reason Children’s Mercy has been rated among the best child hospitals in the nation (more on that later), but did you know how it all got started? Here’s a shot of history + quotes and dates that will give you a healthy admiration for this KC institution. 

The program’s primary goal is to improve the health and safety of families through home assessments and remediation in targeted communities in both regions. DPH and its partners will focus on HUD’s eight Healthy Home Principles: keeping homes clean, dry, pest-free, contaminant-free, safe, ventilated, comfortable and maintained.

Radon testing will also be offered for each home. A tiered assessment model will be used with multiple home visits, ensuring that each enrolled family gets the healthy homes interventions best suited to its needs. DPH is the lead agency administering the Healthy Homes Production grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Lead Hazard Control and Healthy Homes. DPH is collaborating with Children’s Mercy Kansas City’s Environmental Health Program, and each entity will work with local partners. In the St. Louis region, the local partners are the Community Action Agency of St. Louis County and the Missouri Botanical Garden’s EarthWays Center.

In the Kansas City area, the local partners are Westside Housing Organization, Metropolitan Energy Center and Rebuilding Together KC. Additional support has been made available in Kansas City through the Spire Foundation. The partnership will implement the Show-Me Missouri Healthy Homes Program in Kansas City and Saint Louis County.

The St Louis Promise Zone will be the highest priority area in the St. Louis County effort. Approximately $1 million will be spent in Kansas City and about $800,000 will be spent in St. Louis County. The program also seeks to increase the number of professionals in the St Louis County and Kansas City areas with knowledge of healthy home issues through several healthy homes training courses and workshops intended for audiences including contractors, health educators and housing and environmental professionals.

Other efforts will be made to improve the knowledge of healthy home issues to residents of the St. Louis County and Kansas City communities through structured education and outreach programs.

To become eligible for the program, families must meet federal income level criteria. For more information in St. Louis County, visit DPH’s Healthy Homes Program here or call 314-615-5323.

In the Kansas City area, please visit the Children's Mercy Kansas City web site or call the Children’s Mercy Healthy Homes Program at 816-302-8565.

Children’s Mercy works with area adult health systems, including the Mid America Heart Institute at Saint Luke’s, to provide CHD patients with seamless, continuous, advanced care as they transition to adulthood. The Adult Congenital Heart Program will treat all types of congenital heart conditions in adults, including those complicated by heart rhythm problems, heart failure and pacemakers.

Watch a short video about the Adult Congenital Heart Program

Check out the Ward Family Heart Center at Children's Mercy Kansas City

On a previous visit, the 10-year-old chose owls, piano music and a blue background; he’s also chosen eagles, guitar music and an orange background for dressing changes.

The calming, relaxing atmosphere is made possible by an audio/visual projection system installed in the new Burn Clinic on 1 West near the Surgery Clinic, Adele Hall Campus at Children's Mercy Kansas City. Patients pick the lighting (rainbow or combinations of green, teal, pink, orange and purple); music (piano, guitar, chimes, ukulele or violin); and animations (owls, eagles, hummingbirds, macaws or Lorikeet parrots) to set the environment during their burn treatments.

“Blank, white walls come to life,” said Daniel Marx, MHSA, MSN, RN, CPN, Nurse Manager of the Burn Specialty Team and Burn Clinic. “The whole idea is to provide distraction and decrease the fear, anxiety stress and pain patients may experience during burn treatments. It can help to decrease or eliminate the amount of narcotic/controlled medications we have to give.

“Pain is unavoidable with burns, but with distraction technology, instead of patients focusing on a caregiver coming at them with a pair of scissors and thinking ‘this is going to hurt!’ we now have all of these other options to draw their attention away from the treatment procedure,” Daniel added.

For example, especially with younger patients, the caregiver can ask the patient to count the number of birds they see or what color they like best.

“It’s an immersive environment that follows the patient from room to room and even in the hallways,” Daniel said.

Katie Schmuke, RN, CPN, Burn Specialty Team Nurse, said, “It is no surprise that burn care is painful … typically with burns, nobody is excited to see us nurses! But it has been amazing to have this technology to help distract patients from that. Returning to our clinic for follow-up care can cause a lot of anxiety for our patients.  We now have kids who are eager to return so they can pick their bird and music!”

Some patients pick their favorite sights and sounds at every visit; Johnathan, like others, said, “I like picking different ones every time.” He said his favorites have been piano music (he plays the piano), owls and a teal green and orange background.

Johnathan got second degree burns on his foot (“I burned my foot with boiling water while I was making mac and cheese,” he explained), and he said dressing changes hurt “a little bit,” but the worst part was when he heard the initial treatment plan. “When they said they were going to cut it open…WHOA!,” he remembered.

But his mother, Jackie, said the distraction therapy eased the fears and dread of treatment visits and has “absolutely” made a difference in his attitude about visits to the Burn Clinic.

“Johnny really enjoys the ability to pick those things for the environment,” she said. “It puts things more in his control, which is great for kids going through something as difficult as a burn.”

Jackie added, “I was extremely impressed with the facility. My husband is military, so we’ve been to hospitals all over the country. This, by far, has been one of the most accommodating for children. The consideration they’ve put into making this experience as un-traumatizing as possible is tremendous.”

Creativity from necessity

The creativity that has gone into the design of the Burn Clinic resulted from rethinking Children's Mercy’s whole approach to burn care when the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) on 2 Henson was expanded to include the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU). The expansion absorbed space that included seven beds for burn patients.

“It gave us an opportunity to shake things up,” Daniel said. “There really wasn’t room on 4 West (where burn care has four beds) to build treatment room. We had to throw all our cards in the air and adapt while still providing high quality burn care and increasing staff satisfaction.”

Instead of trying to find space for the seven beds and treatment space lost due to the PICU expansion, Daniel and Pablo Aguayo, MD, FACS, FAAP, Director-Burns and Associate Director, Trauma and Critical Care brainstormed a different model.

Previously the Children's Mercy burn unit was connected to the 2 Henson Med/Surg unit. Burn care was transitioned from a unit-based to a team-based approach. The nine-member Burn Specialty Team (BST) was created and the new Burn Clinic on 1 West was built with distraction technology. The BST manages and completes all burn debridements/treatments and ambulatory burn clinic visits.

“With the Burn Team approach, our organization has experienced increased staff collaboration, improved care coordination and increased burn nurse availability leading to decreased time from arrival to initial debridement, all of which improves patient care and experience,” Daniel said. “This is a non-traditional clinic; to my knowledge, this structure doesn’t exist in the pediatric burn world; this is a unique team for a pediatric setting and we’re the only pediatric burn center between St. Louis and Denver.”

The Burn Clinic has attracted attention from other pediatric burn centers; Daniel has met with five who wanted to learn more about Children's Mercy’s burn care model.

Dr. Aguayo said, “This project has been over seven years in the making and has come to fruition through the tireless efforts of so many individuals from within and outside of the walls of Children’s Mercy. These people, from administrators, construction specialists, architects to nurses and doctors, have whole-heartedly embraced the work that is being performed for pediatric burn survivors at Children's Mercy. All of us truly believe that this new outpatient treatment space for burns will improve the care and the lives of so many of our patients and their families. This is a huge win for our city and for our region as we continually strive to improve care of the entire person here at Children’s Mercy.”
 

Learn more about Burn and Trauma Care at Children's Mercy.
 

There is a “shadow pandemic” evolving among our children — a mental and behavioral health emergency. This month, the U.S. surgeon general, citing the additional cumulative stress from the pandemic, issued a public health advisory about this escalating mental health crisis in our youth. We must respond. The time to engage in positive action to save our children’s lives is now. 

Across the country, more children without medical needs are being admitted to pediatric hospitals and are staying longer due to the lack of mental or behavioral health services in our communities. This results in more hospital staff days spent on 1:1 observations to keep these children safe from harm, which increases pressure on bed availability and staffing levels. Due to lack of resources, these children are being deprived of the mental health services they desperately need and, as a result, their mental health needs intensify, and they become more disruptive and more verbally and physically aggressive to our staffs. 

At Children’s Mercy Kansas City, a “Code Strong” is called whenever a patient becomes disruptive and cannot be deescalated. It indicates the patient requires intervention in order to prevent them from doing harm to themselves or others. The team who responds includes social work, hospitalists, pharmacy and security, as well as the shift supervisor and charge nurse. Before the pandemic, Children’s Mercy experienced 23 Code Strongs annually. This year, the hospital will have more than 300.

During this pandemic, kids’ social isolation and increased family stress has only intensified these troubling pre-pandemic trends. From April to October 2020, the proportion of mental health emergency department visits increased significantly among kids ages 5 to 11 (24%) and ages 12 to 17 (31%) versus the same period in 2019. 

We request support for the following efforts:

▪ The demand for pediatric mental health services, both inpatient and outpatient, far exceeds supply. There simply aren’t enough specialty trained health care providers to care for this population of kids. The Children’s Hospital Association estimates our nation needs 47 child psychiatrists per 100,000 kids and teens. Currently, there are 10 per 100,000. Additionally, hospitals lack adequate inpatient mental and behavioral health beds, and our communities lack adequate placement facilities that can provide appropriate and safe care to patients whose mental health needs are the most acute. 

▪ Children’s hospitals are not equipped to care for patients with mental health needs at scale. Due to the shortage of specialty providers for these kids, children’s hospitals are bearing the brunt of the volumes because, in some cases, our emergency departments are a child or family’s only refuge. Holding kids with mental health needs in our emergency rooms — often for 24 hours or more — while waiting for an inpatient bed or community placement is not therapeutic. Stimulation from a busy and sometimes chaotic environment can increase their levels of anxiety and agitation. It frequently results in a worsening of symptoms, higher risk of harm for both patients and staff, and greater likelihood of patients leaving the hospital when doing so may present an imminent threat to their safety. 

▪ We must keep our kids — and our staff — safe. Children’s hospitals — and more specifically, the people who work at them — exist to take care of our communities’ most vulnerable kids at their times of greatest need. But even those who thought they knew what they signed up for — the triumph, the heartbreak, the risk — couldn’t have imagined this. Our most highly acute patients can be a threat to themselves, but also to our staff. Patients who are in crisis do not always know how to express themselves. At times they lash out, and several have inflicted extensive harm on our front-line team members. 

The severity of the “shadow pandemic” requires us to sound the alarm on behalf of our families. We continue to engage with stakeholders to develop immediate next steps. Undeniably, we will need all levels of government and our communities’ grassroots support to rise to meet this challenge. We have always done so in our past, and we know we can do so again. 

Read the letter via The Kansas City Star

Learn more about the Developmental and Behavioral Health Division at Children's Mercy

Tarak Srivastava, MD, FASN, has been named as a new member of the American Pediatric Society (APS), the first and most prestigious academic pediatric organization in North America. Dr. Srivastava and other new APS members will be recognized next April during the APS Presidential Primary PAS 2022 meeting in Denver.

Dr. Srivastava is a Professor of Pediatrics in the Section of Nephrology at Children's Mercy Kansas City. He started his career as a Nephrology fellow at Children's Mercy in July of 1997. His next love after patient care is translational research. He runs a National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded Nephrology Research Laboratory, which is studying drugs to mitigate progression of chronic kidney disease in children. He is actively involved with various multicenter clinical research studies funded by the NIH to understand the disease process in children with Idiopathic Nephrotic Syndrome.

In 2016 Dr. Srivastava received an Academic Achievement Award as an appreciation for his work, and in February 2020 he was recognized as the “Shining Star” award winner for being the top-rated provider by Children's Mercy patients and families over the previous 12 months.

APS members are recognized child health leaders of extraordinary achievement who work together to shape the future of academic pediatrics. New members are nominated by current members through a process that recognizes individuals who have distinguished themselves as child health leaders, teachers, scholars, policymakers and/or clinicians.

“The APS mission is to shape the future of academic pediatrics through engagement of distinguished child health leaders to represent the full diversity of the field,” said APS President Mary Leonard, MD, MCSE. “Our new members represent the most distinguished and accomplished leaders in pediatrics whose outstanding work has advanced child and adolescent health and well-being in pursuit of this mission. I am honored to welcome this exceptional group of individuals to the APS and look forward to their active engagement with many exciting programs within the organization.

See the full list of new, APS members

Learn more about the Division of Pediatric Nephrology at Children's Mercy

Find information about the Children's Mercy Research Institute

But later that year, during a camping trip on Labor Day weekend, what Laurel expected to be a relaxing, fun family trip took a turn when she noticed Katie was struggling to walk the short trip to the campground. She was pale and had no energy. That’s when it hit Laurel that there was more going on, and it was something they needed to figure out fast.

They cut their camping trip short and took Katie into their doctor the next day. There, they learned she was incredibly anemic, and her white blood cell count was dangerously low. Doctors wanted to do a blood transfusion to bring up her white blood cell count, but they quickly learned that Katie was at too much risk of going into anaphylactic shock given the high levels of antibodies in her system.

Over the next few months, Laurel took Katie to doctors across Wichita, where she was prodded and poked many times over by many different specialties, until a rheumatologist finally recommended they find a hospital where specialists could work together to help Laurel find answers for her daughter.

Laurel recalled a friend telling her, many times over the years, how wonderful Children’s Mercy had been for their family. So after a year of searching for answers, Laurel and Katie made the drive to Kansas City, where they met with HemOnc specialist, Dr. Hetherington and began their journey with Children’s Mercy.

After their initial appointment, Dr. Hetherington was able to connect them to other specialists in Children’s Mercy. Katie saw specialists from internal medicine, hematology/oncology, pulmonology and immunology, which turned out to be a huge part of Katie’s healthcare picture. Doctors across the specialties worked closely together to provide comprehensive care for Katie while also working diligently to find a diagnosis.

Finally, after multiple trials and tests, Katie’s team of doctors referred her to the genetics clinic. While clinical testing came back negative for any diagnosis, Katie’s sample was entered into the genetics registry, as were samples provided by her parents.

Laurel and Katie had made the journey to Children’s Mercy multiple times now in search of an answer for Katie. And little did they know, they were finally going to have one.

One day, during a typical day at home, the phone rang. Laurel answered, and on the other end was their genetic counselor, Caitlin.

After 18 years of struggling with Katie’s immune system and blood levels, and years of working with doctors across the region to search for answers, they had finally found a diagnosis and an explanation for Katie’s myriad of symptoms. Through a new flagship program of the Children's Mercy Reseach Institute, Genomic Answers for Kids, doctors at Children’s Mercy were able to pinpoint Katie’s rare disease: Roifman syndrome. A disease that impacts so few people that any information on it is hard to come by – it is estimated Katie is one in 50 people in the world affected by Roifman syndrome.

Having a diagnosis – finally – was a relief, but also brought up more questions for Laurel. After Katie’s diagnosis, she had a hunch that Katie may not be the only one in their family with Roifman syndrome, so she worked with Children’s Mercy to run genomic tests on two of her other children as well. Her motherly instincts were correct, and through the Genomic Answers for Kids program, Laurel now has a diagnosis for three of her children.

“It is really heavy sometimes and can feel really overwhelming. But we’re thankful to have a team that has walked with us through it and been very steady and persistent in not giving up in trying to search for what’s going on beneath the layers,” said Laurel.

Learn more about Genomic Answers for Kids at Children's Mercy Kansas City. 

Read Celia's story.

Born a twin, Celia’s brother hit normal developmental milestones right on time, but Celia always lagged behind. By one-year-old, her brother was walking and Celia wasn’t even crawling yet. Then, the painful, odd movements started, and so did the unending doctor appointments.

“We live in Wichita and we went to so many doctors here – urology, acid reflux, neurology, etc – but no one in Wichita could tell us anything,” said Teresa, Celia’s mom. “Finally, we were referred to the Children’s Mercy genetics clinic when Celia was almost two years old.”

The Children’s Mercy neurology clinic provided a lot of answers for the family, including a diagnosis of dystonia that explained those painful movements. But genetic testing came back normal, time after time, until one day, the neurologist told the family about Genomic Answers for Kids and encouraged them to enroll in the study.

“I thought, sure – why not. We had tried everything at that point -- five years of testing -- and nothing could find an answer,” said Teresa, Celia’s mom.

Months went by and Teresa forgot about the study. Until she received an unexpected phone call from their Children’s Mercy genetic counselor and heard the words, “I wanted to let you know that the research team found the diagnosis for Celia.”

“My whole body was shaking. I started crying. It’s been so long, and so many things have been going on with her health over the years. I just couldn’t breathe that we now had a reason,” Teresa said.

Celia was diagnosed with a PDE2A disorder. She is one of only 5 people to have been documented with this disease in the United States. The symptoms of PDE2A align with every challenge Celia has experienced – movement disorder, developmental delays, low muscle tone, epilepsy and more.

“It’s so nice having a diagnosis,” Teresa said. “Even though we don’t know much about the disorder and there’s not much more we can do treatment-wise, it’s so nice to know what it is that’s causing her delays and challenges. She still doesn’t walk, she doesn’t speak but she does say mom. It’s nice to know what it is – we have that info for us, and for our other kids.”

Celia continues to receive care from a team of Children’s Mercy doctors who are committed to her well-being, and now they have added clarity when treating the symptoms of her rare disease.

Learn more about Genomic Answers for Kids at Children's Mercy Kansas City.

Read Katie's story.

That was certainly the case for Daniel Harper. Like millions of kids, Daniel started playing baseball when his parents signed him up for T-ball. Through grade school, he continued to play baseball anywhere and everywhere the coach could use him—catcher, pitcher, outfield.

But by his sophomore year at Bishop Miege High School, he began having problems throwing with his right arm. “My velocity dropped from 93 mph to 80 to 83 mph and I couldn’t throw a ball past 90 feet without bouncing it,” Daniel said.

At 15 years old, Daniel thought he couldn’t possibly have injured his arm, but he was wrong. An MRI revealed he had a tear in his ulnar collateral ligament (UCL), requiring Tommy John surgery to repair it.

After surgery, Daniel started an extensive rehabilitation program with Jason Yoder, DPT, a sports physical therapist with the Children’s Mercy Kansas City Sports Medicine Center.

Jason worked with Daniel for nearly a year, helping him recover the strength and mobility in his right arm. “We progressed from light forearm strengthening to being able to do a 90-lb. row on a cable machine within five to six months. It was amazing!” Daniel said.

And though he had to sit his junior season out due to the injury, he was back in full force for his senior year of high school, pitching at 93 mph again, and securing a scholarship to play college baseball for the University of Kentucky.

During his freshman year playing for Kentucky, Daniel thought he “tweaked” his right hip. Though it kept bothering him, he continued to play ball through the first three years of his college career.

But when COVID hit, he decided to have his hip checked out. This time he learned he had a torn labrum, a misshaped hip bone, and there was no cartilage left to protect the joint. So, in August 2020, Daniel had surgery to repair his hip, returning to Jason again for rehab.

“Rehabilitating my hip was much harder than my elbow,” Daniel admitted. “I was non-weight bearing for eight weeks on crutches. That really slowed me down, and I lost some muscle mass,” he said.

But Jason used his expertise and the equipment available at the Children’s Mercy Sports Medicine Center at Village West to help this college pitcher get back on the mound.

“We used the pool and blood flow restriction therapy to get my hip moving again. Those were game changers,” Daniel said. Because of COVID, Daniel was able to continue his rehabilitation throughout the fall 2020 semester in Kansas City, returning to in-person classes, practices and games for the spring 2021 semester.

As he prepares for his fifth and final year on the mound for the University of Kentucky, Daniel said he’s ready to leave everything on the field, hoping to secure a contract to play professional ball following graduation.

“After rehabbing from two surgeries over the past six years, I wouldn’t be where I am today without Jason’s help,” Daniel said.

“Without a doubt, he’s the best sports physical therapist in the Kansas City area, but more important than that, I feel like rehab brought me a new friend that I will have forever. That’s the coolest part. We’ve maintained our relationship over the past six years,” Daniel said. “He was the first person I called when I found out I needed hip surgery.”

As Daniel reflects on how far he’s taken his college baseball career, he gives Children’s Mercy Sports Medicine and Jason much of the credit. “They took a scared and timid 15-year-old kid and gave him the opportunity to succeed. That’s the best thing about all of this.

“Through the rehab, I’ve become more confident in everything I do. Facing two physical challenges like this and getting through them makes you realize that nothing can get in your way.”

Three “Brothers in Arms”

Though Jason was Daniel’s therapist, he’s just one of three physical therapists with the Sports Medicine Center who specialize in working with players, from little league all the way through college. Zachary Gove, DPT, and Andrew Melanson, DPT, are his other “brothers in arms.”

The three not only have the training and expertise to help student-athletes rehab from overhead injuries and other surgeries, they’ve “been there, done that.”

All three started playing baseball at a young age, and played at the college level, helping them relate to their young patients’ injuries, goals and baseball dreams.

Jason Yoder, DPT, Operations Manager, Sports Medicine Center at Village West

Growing up in Indiana, Jason started his baseball career with T-ball, playing baseball through grade school, high school and then in college. On the field, Jason’s home was the pitcher’s mound, where he honed his skills and realized he could play at a higher level.

“I didn’t specialize in baseball until later in my career,” Jason said. “I played basketball, football, swam and ran cross country. Baseball didn’t necessarily come easily for me. I had to work hard at it.”

Jason’s hard work paid off. After high school, he decided to attend college at the University of Indianapolis, a Division II school where he was a walk-on. Unfortunately, during a fall game, he was hit in the ankle by a line drive, breaking a bone in his leg.

“I was never able to trust my leg again and struggled with performance after sustaining that injury,” Jason said. “But I went through several months of rehab. That’s what got me interested in pursuing a career in physical therapy.”

Jason focused on his education, completing his Doctor of Physical Therapy at the University of Indianapolis, Krannert School of Physical Therapy. He has more than a decade of experience in orthopedics and sports medicine at Children’s Mercy, building a loyal patient base. Now a significant portion of his cases involve helping athletes rehab from overhead injuries.

“Having played baseball, I understand what my patients are going through, and being able to establish that rapport is huge,” he said. “But as a physical therapist, I take a wholistic approach to the overhead athlete, looking at the entire kinetic chain. Even though a student-athlete may have elbow or shoulder pain, the problem often originates somewhere else, so we look at how that athlete is moving and prescribe a rehab program just for that player.”

Jason and the entire Sports Medicine team often work with the area’s pitching, strength and conditioning coaches, helping players become stronger, more well-rounded athletes. His goal is to help them not only rehab from an injury, but to return to the game in better shape than ever.

“At the Sports Medicine Center, we bridge that gap from rehab to actually pitching in a game and we do a really good job not just of getting these athletes back to baseline, but ready to perform,” Jason added. “That’s what it’s all about.”

With plenty of space at Village West, Jason can get players back into real-life scenarios to be sure they’re ready to return to play. “I play catch with my patients and we put their arms to the test. That’s how we get positive outcomes and tangible results.”

And because the results have been so good, word of mouth has spread about the Children’s Mercy Sports Medicine Center.

“Most of my patients are in high school, but we work with college-level and pro players as well. We have the ability to follow and manage these athletes through their college and early pro careers because of our knowledge and expertise,” Jason added.

Zach Gove, DPT, Sports Physical Therapist, Children’s Mercy Blue Valley

Zach said he’s played baseball longer than he remembers. “T-ball turned into kid-pitch and I just kept on playing,” he said.

As a member of the Olathe East High School baseball team, he also specialized in pitching and playing infield. After high school, he pitched for two years at Johnson County Community College.

He then transferred to Emporia State where he played three more years, finishing out his collegiate career before earning his Doctor of Physical Therapy from Rockhurst University. Today, he still loves the game. “I play slow pitch softball in a local league just to stay in shape and have some fun,” he said.

Though Zach made it through his high school career without injury, all those pitches eventually caught up with him his freshman year at Johnson County Community College, and again his junior year at Emporia State.

“I didn’t have the best throwing mechanics and did not properly take care of my body. I ended up developing terrible elbow pain when I threw. I had some bone chips and spurs in my elbow that needed to be cleaned up,” he explained.

“I went through several months of rehab and training after two surgeries before I was able to get back on the mound. If I had known then what I know now, it might have saved me a couple of surgeries.”

But those experiences also helped Zach have a better understanding of the throwing mechanics necessary to reduce injury, an important lesson he shares with his patients.

“With tournaments and year-round ball, many of these kids end up throwing more than they should, leading to a variety of arm problems, a common one being growth plate injuries referred to as little league elbow or shoulder,” he said. “That’s why it’s important for younger athletes to see a pediatric-trained specialist who’s aware of and knows how to properly treat them with rest and rehab to avoid further growth-plate injuries.

“As a former pitcher and student of the game, I can help patients find flaws in their throwing mechanics that could have led to their injury,” Zach said. “I have experienced what their practices are like and what the yearly grind is like. I can take them to the next level, working on strength and conditioning, and help educate them to avoid injury in the future.”

In fact, Zach is certified in strength and conditioning by the National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). He also is certified in functional dry needling.

Dry needling involves a small, solid microfilament needle which is inserted into a trigger point by a trained physical therapist, such as Zach. A trigger point is a tight spot within the muscle tissue that develops due to injury, overuse or dysfunction.

Dry needling can decrease pain, reduce muscle tension and improve range of motion, allowing the therapist to target issues that cannot be felt manually.

“Dry needling can be effective at treating players experiencing muscular pain throughout the body. A common site I will needle for throwers is the rotator cuff,” Zach added.

In addition to the staff’s expertise, Zach said the Children’s Mercy Sports Medicine Center also has the space and equipment so patients can practice drills and actually throw, helping them move beyond physical therapy to get back in the game.

“We excel at helping our patients become more well-rounded athletes, and that pays off in the long run,” Zach added.

Andrew Melanson, DPT, Sports Physical Therapist, Children’s Mercy Blue Valley

Growing up in Blue Springs, Andrew followed his older brother into baseball, playing on the T-ball, little league, traveling, American Legion and high school teams. When it came time for college, he played ball one year for Barton County Community College in Great Bend, Kan., then transferred to the University of Central Missouri.

Named to Missouri’s high school all-state team three times, he played first and third bases. “I had the good fortune to play with a number of guys who were a lot better than I was,” Andrew said. “Some of them went on to play in college, the minor and major leagues. I still love baseball, and today, my kids are playing.”

Though Andrew never had surgery, he did have some shoulder pain as a middle-schooler and worked with a physical therapist. But his older brother suffered a football injury to his shoulder, making a big impression on Andrew. “Watching my brother struggle to recover from his shoulder injury got me interested in physical therapy.”

Andrew earned his Doctor of Physical Therapy from Rockhurst University. He was fortunate enough to do his last clinical rotation at Children’s Mercy, where he’s worked ever since. Like Zach, he’s certified in strength and conditioning by the NSCA and in dry needling.

He’s also focused on making sure the overhead injury athletes he works with don’t just meet their strength and mobility requirements, but exceed them.

“Knowing how to play the game helps me dig in deeper and understand how the patient’s injury occurred and what they’re trying to get back to,” Andrew said. “We’re able to write a detailed throwing plan for each athlete. Based on the position they play, we can take them through a step-by-step process for throwing, educating them in injury prevention and proper form.”

Plus, Andrew tries to bring perspective to his patients. “Sitting out a couple of weeks and letting that arm heal and rest will go a lot farther in the long run than getting back out there,” Andrew said. “If a patient truly loves the game, let’s not hurt it when they’re 13 or 14. There’s nothing worse than going to a showcase or the next tryout, and playing at 50%, when they could have taken a short break and shown up at 100%.

“We know their arm is going to be moving at a rapid pace in a stressful environment when these patients leave us, so that’s what we try to replicate in the clinic setting,” Andrew said. “We do a lot of drills and take the athletes through hands-on progression to be sure their form is correct and they’re ready to play ball.”

Ultimately, Jason, Zach and Andrew know from personal experience that each level of play gets more difficult as players climb the ranks.

“Whether a student-athlete is playing to get a scholarship to help pay for an education, or they want to play in the majors,” Andrew said, “we’re here to provide everything we can to help them achieve their goals and dreams, no matter what level of ball they play.”

The Injury Free Coalition for Kids^®, Safe Kids Worldwide, Safe States Alliance, the American Trauma Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, BeSmart a division of Everytown for Gun Safety, the Society for Advancement of Violence and Injury Research, the Trauma Centers of America Association and JPMA Cares of the Juvenile Products and Manufacturers Association take part in this effort to educate the public about the burden of injuries and violence to families and communities. Injury Free Coalition for Kids – Kansas City will be among those taking part.

“Whether it be at home, on the road or at play, precautions need to be taken,” said Barbara Barlow, MD, the Founder and Director of the Injury Free Coalition for Kids. “Children are needlessly dying. Every day, 20 children die from preventable injuries, resulting in more deaths than all diseases combined. This has to change.”

On November 18^th, trauma centers and community advocates across the country will work to educate families and community leaders about ways to develop safer environments and provide many with tools to do so. Local and state government representatives will be challenged to acknowledge these concerns and make efforts to address them. At 12:00 p.m. (CST), the public is invited to take part in a live national conversation about the country’s top injury and violence concerns during a one-hour Twitter chat using the hashtag #BeInjuryFree. As the sun goes down that day, hospitals, landmarks, businesses, monuments, neighborhoods and government offices will be asked to shine a green light to raise awareness about the need for change.

Children’s Mercy Kansas City, the lead agency for Injury Free Coalition for Kids – Kansas City, is partnering with local law enforcement, fire departments, public health, child care, educators, families and other healthcare organizations to put the spotlight on the impact of firearm injuries in children and their families. The Hospital’s Council on Violence Prevention is hosting a “Lunch and Learn” on November 10^th to describe the impact of firearm injuries in Kansas City’s children and the risk of firearms in the homes of teens and others who are at risk of suicide attempts. The presenters are Kristyn Jefferies, MD and Shayla Sullivant MD from Children's Mercy. The City of Kansas City is offering a video recording of their interview with Samuel Dillman, MD, a Children’s Mercy Emergency Department physician with the topic of firearm injuries of children treated at CM.

On November 18^th, Injury Free Coalition for Kids – Kansas City, in partnership with Charlie’s House, are inviting Head Start Parents and local injury prevention partners to discuss the impact of firearm injuries in the home and how to reduce the risk on unintentional access to a firearm by children. Kristyn Jefferies, MD will present a poster describing the impact of firearm injury in children residing in the Kansas City community. Letrice Murray, founder of the local Mother’s in Charge along with Tammy Kemp, CM ED Social Worker will provide an opportunity to learn how their work helps families through the trauma of a firearm injury to a loved one. BE SMART for Kids and Grandparents Against Gun Violence representatives will partner with the Kansas City Police Department’s Community Interaction Officers (CIOs) to provide demonstration and distribution of firearm safety devices. Mid-West Trauma Council members will provide a life-saving technique to “Stop the Bleed” and register attendees for the training to be held at a later date. Children's Mercy with Charlie’s House will provide first aid kits and home safety kits to participants.

On National Injury Prevention Day, a number of cities will focus on a specific preventable injury; San Diego will address bike safety, Kansas City will address firearm and home safety, Nashville will look at sleep safety, and Peoria will address child passenger safety. Boston will cover a variety of injury prevention topics including CPS, concussion and youth violence prevention during a conference.

To learn more about what’s being done in other cities across the country go to www.injuryfree.org.

For more information about National Injury Prevention Day or to arrange an interview in advance please contact, Lisa Augustine, 816-302-0197, email: laugustine@cmh.edu or E. Lenita Johnson 816-651-7777, e-mail: Estelljohnson@sbcglobal.net.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the USDA allowed all summer meal programs to begin early and continue through the school year. From March 2020 through August 2021, the Children’s Mercy "Kids Eat Free" program served 43,483 meals at multiple locations throughout the metro area. That’s a record of 73 weeks for a program that usually operates for 10 weeks during summer months only! 

To better serve families during these difficult times, community partnerships were leveraged to provide not only nutritious lunches, but also bags of fresh fruit and vegetables, book and reading kits from the Kansas City Public Library, and free gun locks at some locations.

Since this program started over 5 years ago, 66,765 meals have been served. The Kids Eat Free program will return next summer.

Learn more about the Kids Eat Free Program at Children's Mercy.