Wellness, revolutionized. - Children's Hospital Central California

Dear Friends, Contents
On a clear spring night here on the bluffs you can see forever.
This small distance from the city gets us out from under the ever-present glow. It lets us watch a sky
full of stars, a universe packed with wonder that moves in unison like clockwork. Inside Children’s
Hospital, we strive to perform with our own graceful precision. Whether it’s surgeons performing
advanced procedures, a pediatric critical care unit executing like no other, or a financial team
navigating the stormiest era in memory, we owe our precise performance to one simple thing - a
near-religious belief in planning.
As President and CEO, and Chair of the Board of Trustees, we began our friendship and working
relationship a decade ago. In that decade we have seen this organization go through unprecedented
growth and change. We’ve helped steer Children’s toward an operating methodology built on goalplanning,
focused on keeping all of our strategies aligned with our mission and vision.
Working with The Board of Trustees and every staff member and doctor within our walls,
we’ve made sure that every transition has been proactive and planned. We’ve minimized surprises
without sacrificing flexibility. We implemented a 10-year financial plan that has helped us not just
survive the current economic crisis, but continue to thrive and make advances that will help the
Valley’s kids for decades to come.
As you read this report, you should easily recognize that the story of 2009 is really the story of
all the years of planning that preceded it. The vast construction on our west end owes its existence
to strategic moves made years ago. Our patient safety and performance improvement initiatives
are seeing fruition now because of strategies implemented much earlier. The examples go on, and
are all evidence of a culture of planning that permeates our organization and has allowed every
service line we offer to grow and improve in measured steps. It is a belief in strategy that has made
us not just one of the largest hospitals of our type in the country, but one of the best.
This culture of planning has another advantage in 2010 as one CEO moves to new horizons
while another, Dr. Gordon Alexander, Jr., picks up the torch of caring for kids. This too, is planned.
Many organizations our size do not have the luxury of calm succession planning, but at Children’s
Hospital Central California, we do. As one person put it, “At Children’s, the big deal is that this is
not a big deal.” It’s the result of the kind of planning that has made us who we are, and it’s what
ensures that we’ll be here for a long, long time, no matter who sits in the big office at the end of the
hall. Our history is proof of our future, and out here on the bluffs you really can see forever.
William F. Haug
President & CEO
Children’s Hospital Central California
Greg Coleman
Chair, Board of Trustees
Children’s Hospital Central California
1
Focusing on
Improvement
Using national, international
and in-house outcomes
measurements as benchmarks,
Children’s has mapped
improvements across our entire
spectrum of care. We’ve cut
down medication errors with
technology and teamwork,
utilized unique medical devices
to enhance patient safety, and
participated in studies that
reduced infection rates in our
intensive care units. And that’s
just the 2009 short list.
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9
Technology has advanced
medicine at hyper-speeds,
but nothing fuels healing
as much as well-trained
experts practicing with
compassion in a teamdriven
environment.
Children’s Hospital
recruits, retains and
rewards medical professionals
at the top of their
fields because we know
that in the end, it’s people
that heal people.
17 Procedures &
Implants
Surgeons are helping
kids with advanced
procedures and
devices, including
orthopaedists using
Internal Traction and
the Shilla procedure to
give children a mobile
life, otolaryngologists
installing boneanchored
hearing
devices and neurosurgeons
implanting
self-activated nerve
stimulators to help
kids stop uncontrollable
seizures.