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The research that Sick Kids Hospital is doing is cutting edge. There are very few places in the world that can offer the options that Sick Kids has given to us. The doctors, nurses and scientists work side by side at the bed in a collaborative environment. They share ideas, results and are constantly looking for ways to improve their techniques, constantly looking for ways to give our children back to us healthy and happy. They can do this thanks, in part, to private funding from organizations like Grady's Gift. We can also thank our government for offering juicy research grants that attract the best doctors and surgeons from around the world.
Every year Sick Kids takes care of 15,000 children in their 400 beds, treats 50,000 children in their emergency department and performs over 13,000 operations. Operating a hospital of this size and quality costs over 300 million dollars every single year. They spend a lot of their effort working on ways to help children with CHD's. The very first operation to correct the defect of what we used to call "blue babies" was done at Sick Kids in 1963 by Dr. Mustard. Since then their focus on problems of the heart has grown so that now they do 80% of all pediatric heart transplants done in Canada. There are 12 babies born with a heart defect everyday in Canada. That's 1 in 70 of all newborns…more than the 1 in 800 chance a baby has of having Down's Syndrome and they screen for that while they still don't do any screening for heart defects! More children die of CHD every year than all kinds of pediatric cancer put together. We would really like to help sick kids see those statistics change.
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