(SACRAMENTO)

UC Davis Children’s Hospital has been re-verified as a Level 1 Children’s Surgery Center by the American College of Surgeons (ACS). The designation comes from the ACS Children’s Surgery Verification Quality Improvement Program. It focuses on the nation’s first and only multi-specialty standards of surgical care for pediatric patients. UC Davis Children's Hospital was the first hospital on the West Coast to earn this distinction nearly a decade ago.

The ACS program was developed to improve the quality of children's surgical care. It creates a system that allows for a match of every child's individual surgical needs with a care environment that has optimal pediatric resources.

The guidelines ensure that children needing surgery receive care from a multidisciplinary program with:

quality improvement and safety processes data collection appropriate resources for patients

The level 1 verification — the highest of three — was first awarded to UC Davis Children’s Hospital in 2016 after an extensive site visit by an ACS team of surveyors. The survey team consisted of experienced children’s surgeons, anesthesiologists and nurses. They reviewed the hospital’s structure, processes and clinical outcomes data.

“I would like to congratulate our team for this incredible achievement,” said Shinjiro Hirose, surgeon-in-chief at UC Davis Children’s Hospital. “The American College of Surgeons’ Children’s Surgery Verification program validates our work and places us with the best hospitals providing surgical care for children. I would also like to thank all of our colleagues and partners for their hard work and dedication to the care of children. Without everyone’s help and teamwork, none of this would be possible. I feel privileged to work with such amazing people and look forward to advancing children’s care here in Sacramento.”

To become a verified center, UC Davis Children’s Hospital met essential criteria for staffing, training, and facility infrastructure and protocols for care. This ensured its ability to appropriately care for children who are surgical patients.

A Level 1 Children’s Surgery Center:

has specialty trained children’s surgeons in every discipline, who are able to care for newborns, children and teens offers pediatric anesthesiologists who are available to provide round-the-clock care provides dedicated operating rooms for children available 24 hours a day participates in a national data registry that yields semiannual reports on the quality of its processes and outcomes, identifying opportunities for continuous quality improvement trains future leaders in education and research leads the way in community service and outreach

About the American College of Surgeons

The American College of Surgeons is a scientific and educational organization of surgeons that was founded in 1913 to raise the standards of surgical practice and improve the quality of care for all surgical patients. The college has approximately 90,000 members and is the largest organization of surgeons in the world.