Rady Children's Hospital Foundation

At Rady Children's, we aim to be consistently excellent in the outcomes and experience we deliver to children in our region, and selectively distinctive at a national level in our clinical, research, and education missions. Although we have a broad, encompassing long-term strategic plan, we have a number of near-term strategies and goals that will contribute to our overall plan to create lasting, meaningful change for the San Diego community: Patient Safety; Patient Experience; Improving access to services; and research and discovery.
When a parent walks through the doors of Rady Children's, they expect safe care for their children. As a result, we operate from a stand point that there is no acceptable level of preventable harm. This aligns with our goal to provide consistently excellent service to our patients and their families. Improving the patient experience will include improving the overall quality of care, providing access to additional services, increasing appointment accessibility, new workflow models to reduce wait times, and advancing the use of mobile technology and telemedicine to support rural health medicine.
Rady Children's is also committed to innovation in research, striving to bring discoveries from the lab to the patient bedside. Through our affiliation with UC San Diego School of Medicine and other world-class research institutions, children benefit from basic, clinical and translational research – and from the best minds in medicine working together. We will settle for nothing less than to be a catalyst for the dramatic improvement of children's health.

One of our main functions a non-profit pediatric hospital is to provide programs that benefit and improve the health status of our community. Providing quality programs that benefit both vulnerable populations and the broader community is part of a long-term strategic approach, when combined with innovation and research, which will lead to improved health outcomes in our community and nation-wide.
We utilize a planned and coordinated approach to address community health needs in order to achieve measurable improvement in health status. Each of the programs that we offer is provided through numerous hospital departments and community-based settings to address the physical, mental, and social health needs of children in each of the following priority areas: promoting infant health by reducing mortality and morbidity; preventing obesity and improving health and fitness; childhood injury prevention and treatment, child abuse and family violence prevention and treatment; promoting oral health; developmental services, including early childhood interventions; school health; child health research and health status assessment; access to care; training healthcare providers to ensure access to care; mental health and trauma counseling services.
Rady Children's is in the process of implementing strategies around our nearer term goals for improving patient safety, patient experience, increasing access to services, and research and discovery. In fact, Rady Children's is taking part in a first-of-its-kind effort with 78 children's hospitals nationwide to improve patient safety. The Children's Hospital Solutions for Patient network is focused on reducing harm by addressing specific hospital-acquired conditions and building a “culture of safety." At Rady Children's, we encourage that dedication to safety by recognizing and rewarding our employees when they speak up and take action to stop preventable harm. In addition, we've identified areas where we can improve, such as in reducing Hospital-Acquired Conditions. These include high-stage pressure ulcers, grade 3 and 4 IV infiltrations and surgical site infection rates. We believe that through adherence of evidence-based best practices and the rigorous analysis of serious safety events that Preventable Harm can be eliminated.
We have been similarly pro-active in our strategies to address the patient experience. We utilize surveys from a professional company to measure Overall Quality of Care. Our strategies for improving the patient experience include improving the overall quality of care, providing access to additional services, increasing appointment accessibility, new workflow models to reduce wait times, and advancing the use of mobile technology and telemedicine to support rural health medicine.
Demonstrating our commitment to discovery, we have recently established The Rady Children's Institute for Genomics Medicine.

Rady Children's opened its doors in 1954 as a 59-bed polio hospital. Today, Rady Children's fulfills a number of key roles in our community, which illustrates the resources and connections that support our progress and capability to achieve our long-term vision.
We are the regional pediatric medical center serving San Diego, Imperial, and Southern Riverside Counties. Rady Children's is the only hospital dedicated exclusively to pediatric healthcare and designated pediatric trauma center in the region. We provide care for 90% of the region's children. We are the safety net hospital for children with little or no medical insurance. Rady Children's provides medically necessary care to patients regardless of their ability to pay. More than half of our patients have no private health insurance, and most patients are covered by Medi-Cal, which typically only covers approximately 25% of costs. For more than 60 years, Rady Children's has served the community as this region's only children's hospital providing lifesaving specialty care.
Excellence is part of our covenant with the community and is reflected in the hospital's mission statement: To restore, sustain and enhance the health and developmental potential of children through excellence in care, education, research and advocacy. Every day, our outstanding team of more than 900 physicians, more than 1,000 nurses, nearly 5,000 employees, more than 500 active volunteers, and more than 1,300 Auxiliary members are working to achieve this mission. For the sixth year in a row, U.S. News & World Report ranked Rady Children's among the nation's best in 9 of the pediatric specialties surveyed: Orthopedics (#4), Diabetes & Endocrinology (#16), Gastroenterology and GI Surgery (#28), Cancer (#19), Neurology & Neurosurgery (#22), Nephrology (#21), Pulmonology (#32), Neonatology (#18), and Cardiology & Heart Surgery (#32). Rady Children's is dedicated to providing excellent patient care and an exceptional care experience for our patients and their families every day.
We serve as the center of education and research for tomorrow's pediatric physicians and nurses and other healthcare professionals as they learn pediatric medicine. In partnership with University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, we are the region's teaching hospital of the next generation of pediatric physicians. Each year, we train more than 300 residents, 200 medical students, and 100 fellows. Additionally, Rady Children's is a major pediatric clinical research center, with nearly 500 clinical trials and other research studies underway. We collaborate with world-class institutions, including UC San Diego, the Sanford-Burnham Medical Research Institute, The Scripps Research Institute, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Over the past six decades, Rady Children's has evolved from a small hospital for polio patients to a 551-bed pediatric-care facility dedicated to excellence in care, research, and teaching. In the years in between, Rady Children's maintained a pioneering spirit defined by innovation and strategic growth. Our on-going goal to improve the health and well-being of children in our community, as well as our nearer term goals of improving patient safety and the patient experience, improving access to services, and furthering our research and discovery mission, are all about positioning our organization to make a profound difference and lasting impact on pediatric healthcare. We have the opportunity, and the duty, to profoundly change and improve the quality of life and health for children locally, nationally, and around the world.
Rady Children's has accomplished many things since 1954. We were one of the first hospitals in the nation to introduce laparoscopic abdominal surgery; we became an international leader in the study of child abuse and prevention; we have been pioneers in scoliosis surgery. Beyond exceptional medicine and innovative programs, such as our motion analysis lab and spinal defects center, as well as the development and implementation of new technology, Rady Children's led the way in what has become the design standard for children's hospitals: a family-centered, child-focused environment. The way our Hospital looks, from the colors to the artwork, helped set the standard for pediatric healing. In October 2010, we opened our Acute Care Pavilion, making us the largest children's hospital in California (based on admissions). The facility helps to ensure that we will never turn a child away because our beds are filled.
We have developed a culture at Rady Children's that encourages our caregivers to provide the best care that's right for kids. Amazing care at the bedside is what parents expect and what children deserve. At the very genesis of the tender care we deliver is research. Behind each gentle visit with a patient is the relentless pursuit of new protocols, medicines, and cures. We believe that innovation belongs in every moment here – from the scientist seeking understanding in microbiomics to the nurse striving to find a creative way to comfort a child who is afraid. Rady Children's is committed to innovation in research, striving to bring discoveries from the lab to the patient's bedside. Through our affiliation with UC San Diego School of Medicine and other world-class research institutions, children benefit from basic, clinical, and translational research, and from the best minds in medicine working together.
Whether through patient care, education, research, or advocacy our long and short term goals are about the care and health of our patients and the community we serve. We will settle for nothing less than the dramatic improvement of children's health.