Elliot Opens New Children's Hospital

More than 2,600 children ages 18 and under leave NH each year to be treated at Massachusetts' hospitals. That is something Doug Dean, president and CEO of Elliot Health System in Manchester, is out to change with the creation of New Hampshire's Hospital for Children at Elliot. The new hospital is located within Elliot Hospital. Besides Children's Hospital at Dartmouth (CHaD) in Lebanon, it is the only inpatient specialty children's hospital in the state. CHaD provides outpatient services from its offices in southern NH.

Our board charged us with the sole objective: to save lives, Dean said at a press conference in September, noting that kids often can't wait to be transferred outside of southern NH for critical care. What we are trying to do is be novel in our approach to provide care to the children of this state.  Elliot expects to treat more than 22,000 children in its emergency department and urgent care centers in 2011, and demand for services is increasing. Elliot has a pediatric emergency department, a neonatal intensive care unit and a pediatric/adolescent unit. The hospital also has neonatal and pediatric transfer agreements with many community hospitals in southern NH to treat children needing specialty care.

Establishing the children's hospital means expanding those services. That has included hiring Brian Gilchrist from the Floating Hospital for Children at Tufts Medical Center in Boston to head the pediatric surgery department and adding specialists in areas including neurology, pediatric gastroenterology and anesthesiology, to name a few. The children's hospital has more than 30 specialists in 11 specialties, along with a supporting network of 22 practices providing primary care to 30,000 children.

Dean says Elliot reached out to CHaD to see if the two organizations could collaborate, but CHaD was not interested. CHaD served 34,752 children last year in Lebanon and 68,539 children through its offices in Concord, Manchester and Nashua. CHaD spokesman Rick Adams says CHaD felt that outpatient specialty care was the greatest need in southern NH, so it partnered in June with Children's Hospital in Boston. Through that partnership, specialists in gastroenterology, nephrology and cardiology come up from Boston to treat ChaD patients in southern NH. We believe New Hampshire does not have the population to support two high quality comprehensive inpatient pediatric programs, Adams says of ChaD's disinterest in a partnership with Elliot. Because of that difference in philosophy, we went our separate ways.