Important facts about...

In 1882, Julia Foster Porter renovated a small cottage at the corner of Belden and Halsted streets to establish a hospital dedicated exclusively to caring for children. Read more.

Patient Care

• Licensed for 270 beds, we are Illinois' only freestanding hospital exclusively for kids.
• With nearly 1,100 pediatric specialists in more than 70 specialties, we routinely provide more care to more young people than any other Chicago-area hospital.
• We had more than 462,000 inpatient and outpatient patient encounters – from 32 countries and all 50 states – in 2008.
• More than 1,500 of the most critically ill children from over 100 different hospitals were transferred to us for world-class care.
• Among all hospitals in Chicago's seven-county metropolitan area, we rank #1 in volume for  nearly every pediatric medical and surgical specialty.

Education

• For more than 60 years, we have served as the pediatric training ground for Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
• The pediatric residency program is very competitive, with 1,000 applications submitted for 31 positions in 2008-2009 recruitment year.

Research

• Established in 1986, Children's Memorial Research Center is the research arm of Children's Memorial Hospital, the pediatric teaching hospital for Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.
• The research center is also one of 29 interdisciplinary research centers and institutes of the Feinberg School, where principal investigators who are part of the research center are full-time faculty members.
• In 2008, the center was awarded $31.7 million in external grants and contracts, of which 67 percent came from the federal government, including the National Institutes of Health.

Advocacy and Community

• Child advocacy is a core part of our mission. We have a long history of partnering with government and community leaders to improve the health and well-being of children, and also focus on prevention and health promotion programs. 

• We care for children from every legislative district in Illinois.

• Supporting our commitment to community, we invested more than $110.5 million in community benefit programs in 2008.

Accolades

• We consistently rank as one of the nation's best children's hospitals by U.S.News & World Report and Parents magazine.
• As the first children's hospital in the country , and the first hospital in Illinois, to receive the prestigious American Nurses Credentialing Center's Magnet Award for Nursing Excellence, we're honored to be part of an elite group – just 5% of U.S. hospitals have achieved and/or maintained this distinction to date.

• Giving is crucial to advancing our mission. Donors help us acquire new technology, expand programs and services, recruit leading specialists and foster groundbreaking research.
• Volunteers -- more than 1,200 in 100 different assignments -- provide patients, their families and employees with 51,000 hours of service each year.

Unless otherwise noted, sources for these statements include Illinois Hospital Association COMPdata, Pediatric Health Information System (both for the 12 months ending June 2008), internal data (for the fiscal year September 2007 to August 2008), the United Network for Organ Sharing and the Scientific Registry for Transplant Recipients.

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