Message from the Chief

When your child needs medical treatment, you want him or her to have the very best care available. So, it stands to reason that if your child needs an operation, you will want to consult with a surgeon who is qualified and experienced in operating on children. You may not even be fully aware of what a board certified pediatric surgeon is: to learn more please click here. You also need to seek an environment that provides a total pediatric experience for your child and for the entire family of the child. Our surgeons operate at the Bristol Myers Squibb Children’s Hospital, a modern pediatric facility that is the only free-standing tertiary pediatric hospital in the state.

The pediatric surgeons of Robert Wood Johnson Medical School operate on children from the newborn stage through the teenage years. We are all board certified in general surgery and pediatric surgery and have trained at many of the leading pediatric centers in the country. We are academic pediatric surgeons, not just in practice. That means we have the following priorities:

• To provide the highest quality, modern and state-of-the-art pediatric surgical care for your child, in the safest possible environment, while always being customer focused and assuring that you the parent are fully informed and as comfortable as possible.
• To seek new knowledge in our field and to disseminate that knowledge to our colleagues in this country and around the world so as to improve the care of children everywhere.
• To teach medical students and residents how to care for children recognizing the obligation to provide for the physicians of the future but always in a closely supervised and safe fashion.

Parents today desire and deserve information about their child’s condition. We are available to facilitate that inquiry, and suggest that you might wish to check the following two outstanding sites on the web. There is much on the internet that is, at best questionable, as to medical knowledge; some is plainly wrong. These web links are reliable:

• Medline Plus: Doctors around the world have used Medline for years to gain medical information. This is the public interface to that same extensive medical information source. Type in the medical condition or question that you have in the top box just to the left of the button "Search Medline Plus" and then click on that button.
• Parents Information from APSA: APSA is the American Pediatric Surgical Association, the organization that is the primary professional group for North American pediatric surgeons. Here you will see a list of common problems that pediatric surgeons are involved in, such as appendicitis or pyloric stenosis.