You’ve heard the saying countless times: Children are not small adults. Children are unique individuals with their own specialized needs. Never is this more apparent than when a child needs health care — whether it’s a highly specialized surgical procedure, a simple treatment for an early childhood infection, an immunization or preventive care such as nutritional counseling.

Children are different. And they need different health care that focuses on their unique needs, involves their parents from start to finish and is provided in places designed to be kid-sized and child friendly. Because they’re growing and developing, children’s health care needs are constantly changing. They need extra time, extra monitoring, specialized medications and caregivers with special skills and compassion in understanding the needs of children. For example, hospitalized children under age 2 require nearly 40 percent more nursing care to attend to their medical and psychological needs as well as simply to their needs of daily living and being children.

That’s why all children need children’s hospitals — which are focused solely on their unique needs. Combining compassionate, personal care with the world’s most sophisticated technology; children’s hospitals devote themselves to making sick children healthy once again. Children’s hospitals serve as regional centers for children’s health, meeting the health care needs of children from the most distant rural areas as well as the closest inner city neighborhoods. Because they draw children from all over the region, children’s hospitals care for the majority of children with chronic conditions or congenital abnormalities present from birth, such as heart disease.

Children’s hospitals also serve as vital centers of education in pediatric care, training the pediatricians and family practice physicians, nurses, social workers, dentists and other caregivers for the children of tomorrow. And as centers of cutting-edge research in children’s health, they are responsible for lifesaving discoveries such as vaccines, gene therapies and specialized surgical techniques that not only benefit children, but adults as well.

The Children’s Hospital at Monmouth Medical Center provides a comprehensive continuum of accessible, high-quality, family-centered children’s services thus improving the health status of children in Monmouth and Ocean counties. The Children’s Hospital is dedicated to promoting the development and coordination of children’s programs and services while maintaining professional excellence in research, and education in the field of children’s health.

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