Pediatric cancer specialists at Mayo Clinic Children's collaborate with you to provide advanced, comprehensive care. We combine the latest medical and surgical innovations with a focus on improving long-term outcomes for children and adolescents with cancer.
At Mayo Clinic, when it comes to pediatric cancer, I think what I want people to know is that we're a partner and we're here to help to make sure that kids get all of the top of the line care that we can provide. Pediatric cancer by definition is uncommon and rare. We treat anything that is a cancer in a child, so there's nothing that we don't see. One of the strengths of the team here is that rare is not rare, and we are able to assemble a team of experts in a relatively short amount of time. The benefits of our multi-disciplinary team are that everyone is in one place to come up with a plan quickly. The ideal time when somebody might want to contact us is any time really. Um, oftentimes it's great to be involved right from the beginning. So if there is a patient that has a new diagnosis, that would be great to hear about that patient right up front so we can plan ahead. Our expectation for communication with referring providers is that we are in communication every step of the way and essentially appear as one team to the patient and their family. We like to talk to the referring physician even before meeting the patient often, um. Just to make sure that we have all the information and that we're on the same page, we don't want to say something different from what the referring physician has been saying. We want to be considered really part of the same team. We want children and their families to be able to stay at home or close to home when possible and only need to travel to Rochester when they really need to be here for something. The main reasons why people may want to consider coming to Mayo Clinic for treatment would be things that they can't get at their home institution. But they may need to come here for specific parts of their treatment like proton radiation or special surgical procedures. I would say proton therapy is a really important tool that we have here. Kids with Hodgkin's disease, kids with neuroblastoma in the abdomen. Uh, children with rhabdomyosarcoma anywhere in the body, more often than not, there's a role for proton therapy. We're able to target areas that we need to treat more effectively and reduce the amount of radiation to other parts of the body. So in a in a growing child it makes a huge difference. The field. Pediatric cancer surgery is always evolving and improving. We utilize technologies such as 3D models which help us plan for complex surgeries and also image guided surgery so that we can be more precise and often do things less invasively. If your child has a complex situation where you need special surgery. Uh, well thought out chemotherapy, uh, highly specialized radiation, place like Mayo Clinic provides that. And then oftentimes when they're done with that portion of their therapy, then we um do a transition of care back to their home oncologist and their home treating team. When children and their families come to Mayo Clinic for surgery, we want as soon as they're able to be able to get home. and get back to being a kid and be with their family and friends. What I think of as my role as a pediatric oncologist at Mayo Clinic in southeast Minnesota as an extension of the home team is that we're here when you need us and we can provide some of the services that aren't available at the home institution, but our goal is to get these kids and these families back to all the people that love them.
