When a child falls ill, the family’s daily routine comes to a halt together. From sudden respiratory distress and seizures to congenital conditions and rare or intractable diseases that require long-term management, the reasons children visit the hospital vary widely. The scope of treatment in university hospital departments of pediatrics and adolescent medicine is much broader than the common perceptions of treating colds or gastroenteritis.

They handle a diverse range of conditions arising throughout the growth process, from newborns and premature infants to pediatric neurology, pulmonology/allergy, endocrinology, infectious diseases, hematology-oncology, cardiology, and gastroenterology/nutrition. In particular, a crucial role of university hospitals in charge of regional and essential healthcare is to ensure that severely ill and emergency pediatric patients can receive necessary treatments promptly without having to leave their local region.

Inha University Hospital's Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine serves as a safety net for regional pediatric healthcare, encompassing Incheon and broadly the northwestern part of the metropolitan area. Twenty-one specialists in various subspecialties cover the long journey from diagnosis, specialized treatment, collaborative care, and intensive care, to follow-up observations after discharge. This is because pediatric care requires more medical capacity than adult care, as symptoms and treatment methods can differ depending on age, weight, and developmental stage even for the same disease.

For infants and toddlers who cannot accurately express their symptoms, medical staff must carefully observe small physical changes and judge their condition by synthesizing caregivers' explanations and test results. Severely ill children whose treatment does not end with a single medical procedure or hospitalization require the same level of close attention. Rather than stopping at eliminating immediate symptoms, long-term plans must be established by considering the impact the illness will have on future growth and development.

Actual cases of pediatric and adolescent patients who visited Inha University Hospital highlight the necessity of maintaining a medical safety net for them within the region. A pediatric patient suffering from a severe neurological disease was 18 years old, but weighed only 14 kg at the time of transfer. After being born prematurely, the child suffered from brain damage, seizures, and muscle weakness, and repeated aspiration pneumonia as swallowing functions deteriorated.

The medical staff's treatment was not limited to pneumonia, but focused on improving respiratory and nutritional problems. To this end, collaborative care was conducted with departments such as surgery, otolaryngology, rehabilitation medicine, and the nutrition support team.

Procedures such as percutaneous endoscopic gastrostomy (PEG), which allows patients who have difficulty eating orally to receive nutrition directly through a tube connected to the stomach, and tracheostomy, which helps patients breathe easily by inserting a tube into the windpipe, were performed. Afterward, as stable nutritional supply became possible, the patient's weight increased to an appropriate range, and the risk of aspiration and frequency of pneumonia decreased.

Other cases include a 13-year-old patient who suffered from a congenital intractable blood disease and received repeated transfusions, but recovered normal blood counts after hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and a patient diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 1 at age 2 who successfully grew into adulthood through regular follow-up observations and collaborative care for about 20 years. Such examples show that treating various diseases and accompanying symptoms sometimes requires the combined efforts of the entire hospital. This is why the role of a supportive medical delivery system, alongside professional medical staff, is of paramount importance in treating severely ill pediatric patients.

When medical infrastructure within the region is maintained, pediatric patients can receive necessary treatments within their local community without straying far from their living areas when critical or emergency situations occur.

Inha University Hospital explains that it has established a system centered on the Public Children’s Specialty Care Center where pediatric patients with severe and rare diseases can receive necessary specialized treatment. Depending on the patient's condition, pediatric subspecialties and various other medical departments participate in treatment together.

For patients in critical condition, the role of the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) is vital. Patients transferred here must receive continuous observation and professional intensive treatment tailored to rapid state changes, along with treatments considering physiological characteristics by age and weight.

Pediatric intensive care patients transferred to the emergency room are also admitted to the PICU after initial treatment to receive continuous and systematic care. Meanwhile, newborns requiring intensive care, including premature and low-birth-weight infants and those with respiratory distress, receive meticulous round-the-clock management in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) until they recover.

Although the pediatric population is decreasing due to low birth rates, the medical care required for children with severe illnesses has not decreased. Even after outpatient hours end, there are hospitalized patients in the wards, and children requiring continuous monitoring in the NICU and PICU.

In the field of severe pediatric care, where it is difficult to evaluate necessity simply by the number of patients, professional medical staff, nursing personnel, hospital beds, equipment, and collaborative systems must always be ready to treat critically ill patients whose arrival time is unpredictable. This serves as an essential pediatric healthcare safety net that the local community must possess, extending beyond the function of individual hospitals.

In the process of treating a single child, less visible efforts are continuously invested but easily overlooked. Reviewing test results, pondering treatment directions, consulting with medical staff from other fields, and explaining the treatment process to caregivers fall into this category. The treatment period may last not just a few days, but several years, and the goal goes beyond merely overcoming a crisis. This is because enabling children to eat, walk, and return to school to live their own daily lives is the true essence of healthcare targeting children and adolescents.

Emphasizing that a child's recovery is directly connected to the recovery of a family's daily life, Inha University Hospital expressed its commitment to playing the most important role among the broader community tasks of maintaining stable pediatric care.

This commitment has been validated by high evaluations in both clinical and research capabilities despite the absence of resident physicians in the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. In the "World’s Best Specialized Hospitals 2027" rankings published by the American newsweekly magazine Newsweek, Inha University Hospital's Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine ranked 5th in South Korea and 92nd globally, entering the top 100 worldwide for the first time.

"Having a hospital where children can receive necessary treatment when they are sick is essential to the local community," said Kwon Young-sei, Director of Inha University Hospital’s Public Children’s Specialty Care Center. "Even though the environment surrounding pediatric healthcare is difficult, we will continue to fulfill our role so that children can grow up healthy."

[ⓒ Global Economic Times. 무단전재-재배포 금지]