A Team Deserving of the Best

On a quiet Sunday morning in August 2023, Craig and Amy Calvert were sitting at their kitchen table when the phone rang. The screen said “Penn,” their 15-year-old son’s name. He had stayed home from church to go on a long bike ride.

A force of motion and curiosity, Penn doesn’t do anything halfway. He trains on rural roads that roll through Ontario County, aiming for 100 miles instead of 10. He sets impossible goals and quietly meets them. “He’s a balloon let loose in the universe,” Amy said.

Craig answered the phone, expecting to hear his son’s voice. Instead, a sheriff’s deputy was on the line. There had been a collision. A truck going 50 mph had struck Penn, and he was being loaded into a helicopter bound for Golisano Children’s Hospital in Rochester. The officer couldn’t say much more.

The Calverts drove in silence for nearly an hour, hands clasped. “You step outside of time,” Craig said. “You’re moving, but you’re nowhere. You don’t know if your child is alive.”

The Team that Never Hesitates

When Penn arrived, he was in critical condition. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury and internal injuries his parents would not learn about until later. He was unconscious and struggling to breathe.

In Golisano Children’s Hospital’s pediatric trauma bay, a team of surgeons, nurses, anesthesiologists, respiratory therapists, and pediatric emergency physicians surrounded him. They worked with the precision of people who have done this hundreds of times before, moving in rhythm through a myriad of commands, tubing, and vital signs.

Craig took notice. Through the PULSE 360 Program, he works with hospitals across the country, helping physicians improve communication and teamwork. “What I saw here was different. It was like an orchestra: Everyone had a role, everyone respected each other’s role, and you could feel how much they cared.”

That coordination is the product of years of investment in pediatric trauma care. GCH is the only Level I Pediatric Trauma Center in the region—the highest verification granted by the American College of Surgeons. The designation means that around the clock, seven days a week, pediatric emergency specialists and surgeons are ready for whatever comes through the door: car crashes, falls, burns, gunshot wounds, bicycle injuries, child abuse, and more.

“We’re the safety net for a 15-county region,” said Colleen Davis, MD, MPH, Chief of Pediatric Emergency Medicine. “If a child is critically injured anywhere from the Finger Lakes to northern Pennsylvania, they come to us.”

The Limits of Space

The pediatric trauma team provides world-class care in a space that wasn’t built for today’s needs. When the Pediatric Emergency Department (ED) opened in 2001, it served a much smaller patient population. In the decades since, other emergency departments in the region have closed, and the number of pediatric visits has nearly doubled.

“You could say we outgrew the space the day it opened,” said Elizabeth Murray, DO, associate professor in Emergency Medicine.

The shared entrance with the adult emergency department adds another layer of difficulty. Children often arrive through hallways lined with adult patients in distress, a scene that can be frightening even for the adults who work there.

“It’s important to separate the children being treated from the adults, because seeing adults in their state of illness or injury adds another layer of trauma for them,” said Davis.

“We’ve had national reviewers tell us, ‘If I were a child and didn’t have post-traumatic stress before coming here, I would afterward,’” said Derek Wakeman, MD, pediatric surgeon. “That’s something we think about every day. Trauma isn’t just what happens before you arrive. The environment matters, too.”

Once in the pediatric ED, there is also little private space for patients and families to be together comfortably, or for clinicians to relay information clearly in very intense situations.

“Having a quiet space near the child is really important for moments when we have to explain to parents what happened, what the outcomes will be if they enter surgery, what kind of imaging they’ll need. We don’t currently have the room to do this now,” said Davis.

A Rare and Dangerous Injury

As the Calvert family entered the pediatric ED on the day of Penn’s injury, they, too, noticed the limitations of the space. “When we first walked in, it had the

appearance of some broken hospitals that I have been to,” said Craig. “I would not have predicted the rest of the journey that we ended up getting in terms of quality of care.”

As Penn was stabilized in the trauma bay, imaging revealed a life-threatening complication: His diaphragm—the muscle that separates the chest from the abdomen—had ruptured in the crash. Part of his liver had been forced into his chest cavity, crowding his right lung and making it nearly impossible to breathe.

Wakeman led the operation to repair the damage. “It’s an extremely rare injury,” he said. “In nearly a decade here, I’ve seen maybe one or two like it. It means Penn was hit very hard.”

Wakeman made an incision through Penn’s chest, carefully repositioned the organs, and sewed the torn diaphragm back together. For a brief period afterward, Penn seemed stable. But then his condition worsened. He developed acute respiratory distress syndrome and was struggling to breathe, even on maximum settings for a traditional ventilator.

The ICU team decided to place him on a high-frequency oscillatory ventilator, a specialized device that delivers rapid bursts of air to prevent the lungs from collapsing. It’s a piece of equipment many hospitals don’t have for children, but one that the GCH pediatric ICU (PICU) had added in recent years. “That decision saved his life,” Craig said.

For days, Penn’s recovery was touch-and-go. He was deeply sedated, his body covered in tubes and monitors. His parents barely left his side.

The nurses in the PICU became their anchors. One, Josh, spent an entire night at Penn’s bedside, manually holding his oxygen mask in place each time the teenager reflexively pulled it off in his sleep. “That’s not something you learn in a training manual,” Craig said. “That’s something you do because you care.”

Within a week, Penn began to stabilize. Within days of waking, he was doing sit-ups in bed to prove his strength. A few months later, he was back on his bike.

A New Era for Trauma Care

Stories like Penn’s illustrate both the strength of the pediatric trauma team and the limitations of the space they work in.

“Compared to the facility, the quality of care was like being served a Michelin-star meal at an old diner,” said Craig.

The GCH providers are exceptional—by every metric, children treated at the pediatric ED fare as well or better than those at the largest children’s hospitals in the country—but the physical environment lags behind their skills.

“In those first moments after a child arrives, you have EMS, police, doctors, nurses, and the family all trying to communicate critical information at once,” said Lauren Wittman, DNP, RN, Pediatric Trauma Program Manager. “In our current space, it’s hard to coordinate, and we have to change that arrangement because that first hour of care is the golden hour; outcomes often depend on the level of care that is happening in that window.”

“Everyone here is operating at an A-plus level,” Wakeman said. “We’ve had reviewers look at some of our most critical cases and say, ‘I can’t believe this child survived.’ That’s the level of care happening here every day. The space just hasn’t caught up.”

That will soon change. The Strong Expansion Project, currently underway, includes construction of a new Pediatric ED and Trauma Center designed entirely around the needs of children and families. It will have a dedicated pediatric entrance, larger trauma bays, private treatment rooms, and a family observation area adjacent to the trauma bay so parents can remain close to their children without disrupting care. All told, the space will be seven times larger than the original facility.

The new Pediatric Emergency Department will also do more than expand capacity; it will redefine what healing looks like for children in crisis. The space will feature soft, color-changing lights that shift from bright during emergencies to calm once a child is stable, along with murals and ceiling art designed to spark imagination and reduce fear. Acoustic panels will dampen noise, while family comfort zones with reclining chairs, charging stations, and privacy screens will make it easier for parents to stay close.

In other words, it will be a space deserving of its clinicians and staff.

“We’ve built every detail around what a child sees, hears, and feels the moment they arrive,” Davis said. “It will be a place where families can start to heal together.”