When Millimeters Matter: Pharmacy Teams Power Pediatric Care

Behind every medication a child receives in a children’s hospital stands a team of pharmacy professionals working day and night to ensure it is delivered safely, accurately, and on time. For small children, the difference in outcomes depends on decimal points and milliliters.

Pharmacy teams manage everything from infections to debilitating chronic diseases to life-threating conditions using a variety of medications. These teams make it possible for kids to go to school, play with friends, grow up, and pursue their dreams.

Recent data from children’s hospitals shows the true scale of their work. Among just 59 children’s hospitals (out of more than 200 nationwide), more 3,840 pharmacists and pharmacy technicians prepared and managed approximately 83 million doses of medicine across inpatient and outpatient settings in one year.

“Every recorded dose is a child our hospital pharmacists kept safe or made better,” said Terri Lyle Wilson, vice president of pharmacy at the Children’s Hospital Association. “It really isn’t an exaggeration to call pediatric pharmacists and their team’s heroes. It’s a privilege to support these incredible people in their essential work.”

CHA supports our hospitals’ pharmacy teams by ensuring they get the medicine they need when they need it.

Mitigating shortages

Last year, a national shortage of IV fluids threatened care for hospitalized children across the country. Through CHA’s rapid coordination between the manufacturer, the FDA, and children’s hospitals, nearly 3 million units of IV fluids were prioritized for pediatric use.

CHA worked with hospital leaders to support 750 emergency allocation requests and partnered with federal agencies to extend product shelf life and import supplies from the manufacturer’s global network.

It was a quiet triumph that stabilized the national pediatric supply chain and mitigated a crisis.

While we found success together during that and other urgent shortages, it’s better to prevent shortages than react to them.

That’s why CHA partners with organizations like Angels for Change that are dedicated to building a resilient supply chain for pediatric drugs. The nonprofit advocates for stronger policies and forges partnerships with medicine manufacturers to ensure drugs are always available to kids who depend on them.

Kid-sized equipment

When drugs and devices make it to the bedside, the next challenge is safe administration. In pediatrics, there is huge variability in body sizes and stages of development. The medicine an 18-year-old needs may also be given — in different doses, presentations, and routes of administration — to a premature newborn weighing three pounds.

Administering medicine to a small child often requires specially designed devices and tools. But for many applications, no pediatric-specific device exists. While children’s hospitals pharmacy teams get creative with what they have, safer care means creating devices tailored to different sizes of patients.

Through CHA’s Pediatric Device Innovation work, hospitals collaborate on safer, child-specific tools. The Low-Dose Safety Syringe Project aims to deliver tiny, accurate doses for premature infants, much like one invented in 2022 that has since been discontinued by the manufacturer. The Rectal Irrigation Tube Project is replacing modified adult devices with a purpose-built option that prevents high-risk injuries during delicate procedures.

Whether inventing new products, mixing doses in the middle of the night, or testifying on Capitol Hill, pediatric pharmacists share a single goal: safe, reliable care for children.

“You cannot overstate pharmacy's role in children’s health,” Wilson said. “Pharmacy Week should really be all year. Luckily for me, it is.”