Emergency Department & Trauma Center

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Emergency Department Medical Director

Emergency Department & Trauma Center

Representatives from Toyota Motor Sales, USA recently visited Miller Children’s Hospital Long Beach to present a check for a $45,000 grant. The grant will help fund a Child Life Specialist for the pediatric emergency department (ED) at Miller Children’s for every single day of the week, including weekends.

Child Life Specialists are part of the unique Child Life Program that is offered, free-of-charge, to pediatric patients and families to provide a safe, secure and pediatric-friendly environment. This particular position will help reduce the negative impact of hospitalization through distraction techniques and medical play. Child life specialists talk through procedures in words kids understand and use dolls to “show” young patients what procedures may happen to them. This helps normalize the scariness of an ED visit for children and families. This position is critical, since being in an “emergency setting” can be particularly traumatizing.

In the ED alone, this particular Child Life Specialist sees more than 20 patients per day and more than 7,000 patients per year on average. The Child Life Program at Miller Children’s is one of the few programs of its kind to be offered at a children’s hospital with a goal of reducing anxiety produced by the stress of hospitalization and understanding of medical procedures. A Child Life Specialist provides medical play, informative and reassuring psychological preparation, play, diversion, distraction and support before and after medical procedures and helps children with coping skills.

“We are so grateful for the continued partnership with Toyota Motor Sales for this grant,” says Rita Goshert, manager, Child Life Program at Miller Children’s. “Child Life is an indispensible part of the ED healthcare team for our patients and families. This grant will allow us to provide a child life specialist in our emergency department 7-days-a-week.”

For more than 19 years, Toyota Motor Sales, USA has been supporting Miller Children’s in some capacity, from helping purchase medical equipment to capital campaigns such as helping build out the new Miller Children’s pavilion.

“The relationship we have with Toyota is so valuable,” says Jim Normandin, president, Memorial Medical Center Foundation. “We look forward to partnering with them in their future philanthropic endeavors.”

In collaboration with Long Beach Memorial, the children of the Long Beach community have access to leading pedaitric emergency and trauma care. The emergency department is an Emergency Department Approved for Pediatrics (EDAP), certified by L.A. County, treating more than 23,000 infants, children and adolescents each year. Board-certified emergency medicine pediatricians and the pediatric emergency care team are certified in Pediatric Advanced Life Support (PALS). Once a child becomes stable or needs further specialized care, the emergency department team smoothly transfers patients based on their acuity or needs to one of the specialized general pediatrics, NICU, PICU or hematology/oncology care centers.

The emergency department provides a 24-hour multi-disciplinary and multi-specialty approach for consultation, diagnostic testing and medical management of infants, children and young adults with urgent and emergent medical, surgical and traumatic conditions. The emergency department care team, are all specially trained in pediatrics, and a dedicated emergency department Child Life Specialist is on-hand to patients and their families to help lessen anxieties and explain what is often a first-time hospital experience.

There is a special kid-friendly section of the emergency department that is exclusively for kids and their families, designed specifically for emergency pediatric care.

Miller Children’s Stands Apart

Miller Children’s Hospital is approved by LA County as a designated Emergency Department Approved for Pediatrics (EDAP), one of the few hospitals in the area to provide an exclusive area for kids, including resources such as 24-hour social services.
Board-certified emergency medicine physicians trained in pediatrics, along with nurses trained in pediatric emergency care and a trauma response team, manage the emergency care of more than 23,000 children each year.
Miller Children’s is the regional children’s hospital that trains the majority of Los Angeles County paramedics in pediatric emergency care through the paramedic training program.