As you know, our inpatient service has been near or at capacity for the past month. This has especially been true for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit. We are working towards both short-and long-term options to resolve these space issues. Thank you to all the faculty who are managing these bed issues!

Thank you to all of you who attended the “Bias 101 Training” last week! We had over 200 participants! This training will be offered in different venues. If you were unable to attend last week, please reach out to Stuart Gold, or click here, to identify a training session. 

So many of the patient families as well as our own faculty and staff are struggling with ongoing remote education. Each family has its own set of challenges with remote schooling. There are no simple solutions! Here are a few resources from the UNC Department of Education that may help us find ways to cope and thrive in a remote learning environment. We will continue to look for ways to support one another. We’re in this together!

Finally, please attend the School of Medicine Faculty Meeting scheduled for October 14^th from 4:00p to 5:15p. 

Dr. Elisabeth Heal joined the Pediatric Cardiology faculty on September 14th. Dr. Heal graduated from the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences and completed Pediatric Residency at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children. She completed a pediatric cardiology fellowship at the Medical University of South Carolina where she also received a Master of Science in Clinical Research. She then completed a 4th year interventional pediatric cardiology fellowship at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Dr. Heal is boarded in both Pediatric Cardiology and Adult Congenital Heart Disease. She has been an Assistant Professor in Pediatrics and Director of both the Exercise Testing Laboratory and Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring Program at the University of Minnesota. In addition to her outstanding clinical skills, she has published and presented several research endeavors with an emphasis on interventional cardiology, exercise testing, congenital heart disease, heart transplant, and medical device development.   She will be joining Dr. Frantz in the interventional cardiology laboratory.  She will also engage in all aspects of the program including the Adult Congenital Heart Disease team.

Dr. Laura Reniker joined the Department of Pediatrics on September 14th. She comes to UNC from Lake Norman Regional Medical Center in

UNC Children’s Urgent Care at Raleigh is being awarded the 2020 Carolina Care Award for Patient Engaged Process!

The team was nominated by colleagues and chosen from over 150 submissions!

This half-day virtual program, with many speakers from UNC, seeks to promote the health and well-being of children and adolescents. Sessions will focus on advancing pediatric health care across the Sandhills region by providing the most current evidence-based guidelines in medicine and facilitating a multidisciplinary network opportunity for health care professionals.

The goal is to improve providers’ clinical knowledge and skills related to the care of child and adolescent patients with a variety of acute and chronic conditions. Jennifer Green, PhD, MPH, Health Director of Cumberland County Department of Public Health, brings her considerable knowledge and passion in community health education and public health to the conference as keynote speaker.

Alison Sweeney, MD, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Hospital Medicine, is 1 of only 22 faculty selected from across the School of Medicine as a new scholar for the 2020-21 Teaching Scholars Program.

The Teaching Scholars Program aims to promote teaching expertise in medical education. Through the program, participants develop skills in teaching and assessment of learners, and become familiar with issues in contemporary medical education. Graduation from the program confers recognition as a scholar in medical education and provides the School of Medicine with a resource of talent in education. Congratulations!

If you couldn't join us for the UNC Children's Virtual Meeting on Thurs, September 17th, you can check out the recording!

To learn more about how we created our goals, please take a moment to watch this video featuring Amy Higgins, UNC Health’s Chief Transformation and Experience Officer.

If you have any questions about these resources, our FY21 Goals or our Long Term Goals, please email oneunchealth@unchealth.unc.edu.

Objectives: Implement a wellbeing program using certified health coaches

Eligibility: Assistant & Associate Professors in Department of Pediatrics on UNC main campus

For more information, contact Suzanne Kennedy suzanne_kennedy@unc.edu

Camille Ehre, PhD - Pediatric Pulmonology - and her fantastic colleagues published amazing images of Sars-CoV2 on respiratory epithelium in the New England Journal of Medicine and featured on Good Morning America.

Ian Davis, MD PhD - Pediatric Hematology-Oncology - has recently been awarded $600,000 over 3 years for the study “Combining cellular and epigenetic therapies to treat pediatric solid tumors.” This award from the V-Foundation is co-funded by the Dick Vitale Gala and WWE in honor of Connor’s Cure.

Jennifer Goralski, MD - Medicine and Pediatric Divisions of Pulmonology - has recently been granted a K23 award support of her project,"Quantitation and Spatial Registration of Airways Dysfunction with Dynamic 19F MRI in Cystic Fibrosis"

Michael O'Shea, MD - Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine - has a a new supplement to the ELGAN-ECHO project. The Diversity Administrative Supplement, in support of UNC doctoral student (Neuroscience) Carmen Marable, MPH, is intended to improve the diversity of the research workforce by supporting students, postdoctorates, and eligible investigators from groups that have been shown to be underrepresented in health-related research.

Jackie Patterson, MD - Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine - received the R21 component of an NICHD Phased Innovation Award (R21-R33) to develop and evaluate a mobile health application that delivers automated feedback both during and after newborn resuscitation for providers in low-resource settings, "An Integrated mHealth Strategy to Improve Newborn Resuscitation in Low and Lower-Middle Income Countries."

Genny Taylor, MD - Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine - will serve as the operations lead on The Global Rank Score for Critically Ill Newborns project, a $414,000 subcontract award from the Duke Clinical Research Institute (DCRI) through an FDA supplement grant to the Global Pediatric Clinical Trials Network. The team of Drs. Taylor and Matt Laughon will engage neonatal researchers, clinicians, and parents in a consensus process to develop a novel clinical endpoint designed to improve findings from pediatric clinical trial data. 

Kate Westmoreland, MD - Pediatric Hematology-Oncology - has recently received 2 NIH awards:

Applicants must be a faculty member at UNC Children’s Hospital, or be a current fellow in good standing within UNC Hospitals, pursuing pediatric research. Applications are due by midnight Oct 5. Additional details and a link to the application process can be found on the CRI website.

This is Kim, Bryan, Charlotte and Finn Batten. On Sunday, September 13th, they hosted the second annual Liam Strong Charity Beach Run in honor of their son Liam, who was a precious patient of UNC Children’s that passed away at only 6 months old in 2015 after fighting a very rare form of brain cancer.

When COVID-19 hit, we were worried about how we would make this event happen, but thanks to the amazing sponsors, donors, volunteers and in-person and virtual race participants, we were able to make this year’s Liam Strong Run even more of a success than the first by raising awareness and $40K in support for childhood cancer in Liam's honor.

Also, many thanks to Dr. Benny Joyner for joining the run!

Congratulations to Dr. Kori Flower, Professor of Pediatrics, and the Carolina Conexiones team, including the Director of Volunteer Services, Linda Bowles, and Kristina Morris, volunteer coordinator with UNC Health. Carolina Conexiones was awarded the 2020 Impact Award from the Society of Volunteer Healthcare Leaders. The SHVL Impact Award recognizes one volunteer services program each year for outstanding contributions and professionalism in the field of Healthcare Volunteer Administration. This national honor highlights a program that has made a significant positive impact to the healthcare organization and the communities served by the organization.

Meredith Cuthriell has been invaluable and indispensable in the planning, coordination, and timely execution of discharges for our COVID inpatients. She has been the glue and the consistency of the Pediatric COVID inpatient service. Without her, discharges wouldn’t have happened (PICU docs don’t typically discharge patients), follow up appointments wouldn’t be made, and she's caught mistakes by the discharging MD, on more than one occasion. 

Finances at UNC are complicated! For the last few years, we have been very fortunate to have Lori Slack taking care of our financial resources. Lori has worked incredibly hard developing new, more detailed reports, improving budget models, negotiating improvements in hospital contract management, and planning for the future of the department. 

 

Lori joined the Department from Duke University in April of 2012 as a Contracts & Grants Administrator, principally supporting the Food Allergy research of Dr. Wesley Burks. Lori was soon promoted to Contracts & Grants Manager, supervising all the Pediatric Research Administrators and supporting research across the department. Since February of 2018, she has been the Director of Finance and Clinical Research. 

 

If you’re fortunate enough to have gotten to know Lori, you know she is smart, earnest, organized, and dedicated to her work. Given all of her strengths, I wanted to share how much her positive outlook, adaptability, creativity and personal integrity have meant to me and the department as a whole. Lori has accepted a new position outside of UNC, leaving us at the end of October, and we will be sorry to see her go. Thank you, Lori!