Mental well-being has increasingly become a major focus in our conversations about overall health, and for Sandy Mueller, LCSW, senior director of Behavioral Health Services at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, that’s a very good thing. Our whole-child approach means the team supporting children includes a growing list of care providers, including pediatricians; psychologists, psychiatrists and…
It’s been said that a good meal feeds the soul as well as the stomach, and for Carlos Morfin, one of the chefs behind the action stations in the Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego cafeteria, that sentiment drives everything he does on the job. While our clinical staff get lots of (well-deserved) recognition for their contributions…
by Monica Wing, RD, CNSC, CLEC Everyone gets caught up in daily routines and multitasking, making it difficult to stop and listen to what our body really wants and needs. Fueling the body with food is a necessity and is important for many crucial physiological and chemical processes, but eating should also be a pleasurable…
With proper care, type 1 and type 2 diabetes are generally manageable conditions. Even so, treatment options are vast and care plans can be complex — a lot to navigate for anyone, especially a child. In Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego’s Division of Endocrinology/Diabetes, diabetes nurse educators like Kim McNamara, RN, BSN, CDE, (pictured on the…
Around the Peckham Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, Jenny Kim, MD, is a familiar face to patients and families, staff, and up-and-coming health care professionals alike. As director of the Comprehensive Sickle Cell Center and a clinical professor of pediatrics at University of California San Diego School of Medicine,…
Over more than two decades, San Diego-based nonprofit Fresh Start Surgical Gifts has been enacting positive change throughout the local community, across the nation and even around the world. How? By offering underserved youth with physical differences — due to congenital conditions, trauma or health conditions — reconstructive surgeries and applicable health services, such as…
Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego’s Center for Healthier Communities (CHC) is home to nearly 20 initiatives that focus on building and maintaining healthy lifestyles from an early age. Through accessible, resource-rich programs that draw upon in-depth child and community health research, the CHC and its partners work to enact positive change all over San Diego, with…
There are few things cuter or more joy-inducing than dogs. Their ability to connect with humans — uncanny. Their cuddling prowess — unparalleled. And their positive effects on health — pretty darn undeniable. Scientific studies have shown that simply petting a pup increases one’s output of the feel-good hormones serotonin, oxytocin and prolactin, in turn…
Justin Ryan, Ph.D., is an artist — a very specialized, highly technical, life-improving artist. After all, as director of the new 3D Innovations (3DI) Lab at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, he and his team craft 3D models of hearts, brains, bones and more to streamline surgical plans and improve outcomes for even the Hospital’s most…
Karen Miller, B.S.N., R.N., C.E.N., (pictured in the birthday hat with some of her neuro-oncology teammates), has been a nursing pro for the past 12 years, and has been overseeing all aspects of brain tumor cases at Rady Children’s Peckham Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders since June 2018. We chatted with the San Diego…
George Sutherland, M.B.A., R.R.T.-N.P.S. (pictured middle right), is going places. And while he certainly excels in his role as Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego’s extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) coordinator, we mean this literally. That’s because in Nov. 2018, Sutherland led a group of Rady Children’s ECMO experts on a volunteer trip to China, where they helped…
If you take a walk by our inpatient pharmacy on the weekend, it’s likely you’ll catch Kelly Chan, a 23-year-old Doctor of Pharmacy candidate at UC San Diego Skaggs School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences, hard at work as an intern. For Kelly, vying for this role was an easy decision — after all, Rady…
It’s a Wednesday night. The lights in the Peckham Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego are low, and a lull has fallen over halls that were full of hustle and bustle just a few hours ago. But in the midst of the evening quiet, there’s still activity afoot. From patient…