Each year more than 7,000 children are admitted to Texas Children’s Hospital Intensive Care Units. Texas Children’s has one of the country’s largest, busiest and highest acuity Critical Care services, with 160 intensive care beds across our three campuses, all staffed by critical care trained physicians, advanced practice providers and nurses. Legacy Tower, a new building that opened in 2018, provided Texas Children’s with an extended intensive care footprint, expanding our number of available beds across the Texas Children’s system by 38%.
Our Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) spans floors 9-12 in Legacy Tower. These beds include dedicated Neurological, Surgical, Pulmonary, and Hematology/Oncology cohorts with nurses and physicians trained to care for these unique populations. In addition to these subspecialty cohorts, we also offer a General Medical PICU and a Transitional ICU, which often focuses on the care of children with complex medical needs who are often technology dependent. Our West and Woodlands Campuses also have General Medical PICU units, allowing patients to receive care close to home.
Our Cardiovascular Intensive Care Unit (CICU) spans floors 16-18 in Legacy Tower. These beds include a dedicated cohort for neonatal patients, in addition to a dedicated heart failure ICU which is the first of its kind in the nation. Our cardiac catheterization labs, cardiovascular operating rooms, and CPCU (Cardiology Patient Care Unit) are all located centrally within Legacy Tower.
Our Intensive Care Service also has a dedicated transport team, the Kangaroo Crew®, that transports approximately 2,000 critically ill children from around the nation, to our ICUs. We care for children from all over the country and from overseas, who are referred to us for medical and surgical intervention that often cannot be provided locally. These include care of children after major trauma, children with severe infections, children with cancer and suppressed immune systems and children with failure of one or more major organ system.
As one of the busiest transplant centers in the country, we have invested a great deal of time and effort in research, training and investment in new extracorporeal technologies in order to offer to every child who needs a new heart, lung, liver or kidney, the greatest chance of surviving long enough to receive a transplant. Our unit philosophy is to offer the best available care to every critically ill child that needs it.