Transformative Changes for Pediatric Health Care

Hear from Stanford Medicine Children's Health CEO Paul King as he delves into transformative pediatric cancer and health care innovations.
https://www.webmd.com/children/video/paul-king-stanford-childrens

-- TRANSCRIPT --
JOHN WHYTE: Welcome, everyone. I'm Dr. John Whyte, the chief medical officer at WebMD. For anyone who is a parent, their child's growth and success is a top priority. As parents, we want to maximize their physical health, but also their mental health.

In recent years, many kids and families have been struggling. How do we fix this? My guest today is Paul King, the president and CEO of Stanford Medicine Children's Health, and he has some potential solutions. Paul, thanks for joining me today.

PAUL KING: It's my pleasure. Nice to see you, John.

JOHN WHYTE: Paul, I want to start off with we're seeing many more cases, particularly in mental health challenges, for kids. Is it mostly because of the pandemic? Or are we more aware and more attuned to the mental health aspects of children?

PAUL KING: I wouldn't say that it's due to the pandemic. The pandemic certainly didn't help. But when we think about mental health, particularly mental health for kids, I think if you look at any of the statistics that are reported through any number of different data sources, they'll share with you that most mental health disease is recognized, I think, more than half of it, by the time you're 14, and nearly 75% of it by the time you're 24.

So if we think about mental health as a childhood disease, clearly, the sooner we can recognize it and begin to treat it, the more successful we'll have in terms of helping kids have a brighter future. During the pandemic, when we were all sequestered and kids were left at home, not only with schooling, but also with just their life in general and being separated from their friends and classmates, I think that exacerbated what was already sort of an underlying condition of anxiety and depression. That is, I think some of the stigma also around mental health has been lowered. It's not, certainly, gone, but I think people are OK with actually talking about it now, whereas in the past that probably wasn't always the case.

JOHN WHYTE: So there's the one issue of the mental health. And I also talked about the aspects of physical health. And one of the things that we've seen in recent years is an increase in the rate of cancer in pediatric population. What do you think's going on here? And what are you doing to help address it?

PAUL KING: A great question. I think as a physician, John, you know certainly better than I that we actually have a pretty good story to tell, particularly in childhood cancer. I think when you go back to the '50s and '60s, childhood cancer was, in those days, probably a fatal disease, whereas now, many of the cancers that children incur, particularly in the leukemias, they're cured.

And I think the increase that you're seeing in cancer cases across the country, across the world, actually, is an indication of probably better diagnosis and more case capture. We still, I think, have a pretty good story to tell in childhood cancer. I think some of the differences we see in childhood cancer that you don't see in adult cancers is the children's hospitals and children sort of collection of providers.

We probably do a little better job of sharing in terms of the children's oncology group, in terms of what works and what doesn't. And so those better practices are adopted and implemented more quickly in children's space than you would see similarly in adult cancers. And you also see a concentration of children cancer providers, primarily at the larger children's hospitals.

And so there's fewer people engaged in science-backed, science-proven treatments as opposed to a number of providers sort of dabbling in it. And so I think we have a better story to tell in terms of children's cancer treatments.

JOHN WHYTE: Paul, you talk a lot about innovations, but you also talk about transformation. So I want to push on that a little, because in the pediatric space, a lot of people have tried transformative interventions and failed. As you know, hospital care, health care is a very difficult beast, maybe, I will say.

So tell us about what you're doing that you believe is transformative, and why are you going to succeed? What's different, where others have equally tried and have failed?

Transcript in its entirety can be found by clicking here:
https://www.webmd.com/children/video/paul-king-stanford-childrens

Видео Transformative Changes for Pediatric Health Care канала WebMD