Blair E. Batson Children's Hospsital

It happens every day. Children are struck down by illness and injury. It may begin with a simple cough or an accident. And often it strikes with sudden, unrelenting violence. Thousands of Mississippi children and their families must deal with this reality each year. At the Blair E. Batson Hospital for Children, staff members work hard to overcome these obstacles. They cannot do it alone. It takes support from the community to keep the hospital on the cutting edge of contemporary health care.

Children Hospital averaged 9,000 admissions last year, and more than 150,000 youngsters from all of Mississippi's 82 counties were treated in its clinics and emergency room. They came as the victims of serious trauma or with life threatening or chronic illnesses - cancer, cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, hemophilia, congenital heart defects and many others. Their illnesses were diverse, but they had this in common: they were all children, not just tiny replicas of adults, and they all needed the care that only the Batson Hospital could give. They needed the clinics, the machines, the instruments tailor-made for them, and the people specially trained to care for them.