Emergency & Inpatient Pediatrics at GBMC

See Your Pediatrician or Family Medicine Physician

In most cases, it’s best to contact your child’s pediatrician or family medicine physician first with any health concerns. Most practices offer after-hours phone lines for parents to speak with an on-call nurse about their child's symptoms. Medical concerns that can usually wait until the next day are:

• Cough or sore throat
• Vomiting or diarrhea
• Runny nose
• Ear pain
• Eye drainage
• Fussy baby
• Fever of 100.4 F/38.0 C or greater before any medication is given

*height of fever doesn't indicate severity of illness

Go to an Urgent Care Facility

Health issues don’t always happen during business hours, especially with children. If your child has an illness or injury that is not life threatening, but can’t wait until the next day, an urgent care facility is the place to go.

Common non-life-threatening illnesses/injuries are:

• Small cuts or minor burns
• Fractures or broken bones that aren’t causing severe pain
• Sprains
• Sinus infections
• Pink eye

Go to the Emergency Department

Pediatric and adult Emergency Departments are intended to care for those who have serious, life-threatening illnesses or injuries that require immediate medical attention.

Take your child to the Emergency Department in these cases:

• Trouble breathing/shortness of breath
• Head, spinal cord, or eye injury
• Seizure
• Severe bleeding or burns
• Chest or stomach pain/pressure
• Allergic reaction (swelling of face, lips, tongue, eyes; fainting; trouble breathing; hives)
• Lips, skin, or fingernails that have turned blue or purple
• Fever (100.4 F/38.0 C or greater, taken rectally before any medication is given) in an infant younger than two months old
• Uncontrolled pain
• Animal or human bite

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A model of care that merges emergency, observation, and in-patient care into one integrated setting

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Opened in 2004, the Pediatric Combined Care Unit sees approximately 10,000 children a year in the ED setting and approximately 1,200 children are admitted to in-patient/observation. We are open 24/7 and provide high quality care to patients from birth to age 18. Our caregivers include 9 Board-Certified pediatricians and 20 pediatric nurses certified both in Pediatric Advanced Life Saving (PALS) and Emergency Pediatric Nurse Core Curriculum (ENPC). The average length of stay time in the Peds ED for serious conditions (those patients who require significant work-ups, admission, or transfer) is 180 minutes, and for less serious conditions, 120 minutes, below national averages for similar institutions. 

Available in-house for our pediatric patients are Otolaryngology, Ophthalmology, and Pediatric Surgery. Our Pediatric Surgeons are known to be among the best in the state. For new breast-feeding mothers with sick infants, our nurses along with lactation experts provided breast-feeding support throughout the infant's hospital stay. For babies who are readmitted after discharge from the nursery or NICU, our neonatologists will provide their ongoing expertise if needed. Available by phone consultation for our pediatric patients are Pediatric Neurology, Gastroenterology, Cardiology, Neurosurgery, Pulmonary, Rheumatology, Allergy and Immunology, and Infectious Diseases. We have a standing affiliation with Johns Hopkins Pediatric Cardiology and are able to obtain rapid readings of Echocardiograms. We also have a psychiatrist or psychologist available on a daily basis to see Pediatric patients in psychiatric crisis. For those patients in need of a higher level of care in a tertiary hospital, our physician-nurse teams are experts in rapidly stabilizing and transporting patients.