Rady Children’s Gastroenterology and Nutrition Division – a joint program of Rady Children’s Hospital and UCSD – is committed to three very important goals:

• Exemplary clinical care.
• Teaching medical students, residents and GI fellows.
• Basic and clinical research in digestive diseases.

Teaming up to meet these goals are a board-certified faculty - and the sole providers for pediatric digestive diseases in San Diego and Imperial counties.

For Rady Children’s, this is both a gift and a challenge.

The gift, of course, is having this highly skilled staff of physicians available to the children in our community through a wide array of specialty clinics, such as those described in this newsletter. The challenge comes in having so many children in need of these services. “One of the hardest aspects we face is the need to provide access and maintain quality for each patient,” says Dr. Joel Lavine, Director of the Gastroenterology and Nutrition Division.

It is perhaps this dichotomy that leads the Division to its commitment toward education for other physicians and its dedication to research. “To find new frontiers really drives our team,” Lavine explains. “You realize you’re making strides to help all children with these challenges, as well as, of course, the children in our own community.”

Discovering those new frontiers – and applying the knowledge here at Rady Children’s – is always a priority for Lavine and his team, demonstrated by their affiliations with and participation in national studies and organizations. Lavine, for instance, has been appointed by the National Institutes of Health as Chair of the Data and Safety Monitoring Boards for the Multicenter Consortium on Biliary Atresia and for the Chronic Liver Disease Consortium. He was also appointed to the Executive Committee of the NIH Institute for Digestive Diseases (NIDDK) Multicenter study on Fatty Liver Disease and serves on the NIDDK Study Section for training grants and career development awards.

The Division has been chosen as a site for the NIDDK sponsored, R01-funded, multi-center trial on Pediatric Acute Liver Failure. The pediatric liver transplant program at Rady Children’s has been funded by the NIDDK for their participation as one of the centers in “Studies in Pediatric Liver Transplantation (SPLIT)”.

So what does all this mean for pediatricians here in San Diego?

Simply put, it means that physicians and their young patients here have access to world-class consultations on all aspects of gastrointestinal disease, including:

• diagnostic and therapeutic endoscopy
• living-related and cadaveric liver transplantation
• acute and chronic liver disease
• motility disorders
• parenteral and enteral nutritional supplementation
• disorders of the pancreas and gallbladder
• inflammatory bowel disease
• feeding and swallowing disorders
• obesity
• peptic disorders
• functional bowel disorders

Learn more about the gastroenterology/nutrition clinics and physicians