Paediatrics

The Department of Pediatrics was founded in 1953. Over more than 70 years of development, it has continued to grow and has now become a large, comprehensive hospital pediatric department integrating medical care, teaching, scientific research, prevention, and health care. As a key specialty in Beijing and a flagship department for the coordination of traditional Chinese and Western medicine, the Department of Pediatrics has an elite team of more than 170 medical and nursing staff. Homogeneous management is implemented across the Xicheng, Tongzhou, and Shunyi campuses, all of which operate outpatient and emergency services 7 days/week × 24 hours, year-round without interruption, and are equipped with standardized general pediatric wards and laminar-flow neonatal wards. The annual total number of outpatient and emergency visits exceeds 300,000, and the annual number of discharged patients exceeds 4,000.

Since the 1960s, Professor Zhu Shouhe, the founder of the discipline, pioneered the use of artificial hibernation and high-dose atropine to treat critically ill children. He also extracted anisodamine (654-2) from Chinese herbal medicines, reducing the case-fatality rates of epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis and toxic dysentery, which seriously threatened children's lives at the time, from 30% to below 1%, thereby laying the foundation for the integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine treatment of critical illnesses. Since the 1970s, senior experts including Professors Yan Tianyu and Li Gui took the lead in carrying out clinical practice in Western medicine hospitals using traditional Chinese medicine to treat common and critical pediatric diseases involving respiratory tract infections, digestion, the kidneys, nutrition, and other areas, developing nearly 100 standardized traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions. More than 10 highly effective hospital preparations have continued to be used to this day, creating the “Youyi Xiaoyao” brand and establishing a distinctive diagnostic and treatment system for pediatric respiratory infections, chronic cough, asthma, digestive dysfunction, and other diseases.

Today, the Department of Pediatrics of Beijing Friendship Hospital focuses on neonatal diseases and pediatric respiratory and digestive system diseases, and has developed multiple specialty areas with distinctive characteristics. As a regional transfer center for critically ill neonates, the department relies on a strong neonatal intensive care team and continues to devote itself to the fields of brain injury in premature infants and critical illness treatment. It routinely performs advanced technologies such as bedside bronchoscopy, pulmonary function testing, and neurocritical care monitoring including cerebral oxygen monitoring and electroencephalography, and has successfully treated a large number of children with acute, critical, and early-onset rare diseases. For children with severe pneumonia, the Department of Pediatrics fully leverages the advantages of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine, combining standardized traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions with modern respiratory support technologies to significantly improve efficacy and shorten the course of illness. Relying on the substantial strength of the hospital’s National Clinical Medical Research Center for Digestive System Diseases, the department is a leader in the field of pediatric digestive system diseases. It possesses advanced pediatric digestive endoscopy and ERCP (endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography) technologies, providing precise minimally invasive diagnosis and treatment for children with difficult and complex digestive diseases. At the same time, the department has established a child health management system covering the entire life cycle, from growth and development monitoring and neuropsychological and behavioral assessment to standardized diagnosis, treatment, and management of allergic diseases, providing personalized and continuous health guidance and early intervention for children of all ages.

As a doctoral and master’s degree awarding site and a postdoctoral training site of Capital Medical University, the Department of Pediatrics undertakes a number of national- and municipal-level scientific research projects and has received 21 scientific research achievement awards at various levels, including one national key research award. The Department of Pediatrics has always upheld the spirit of inheritance and innovation, the distinctive characteristics of integrated traditional Chinese and Western medicine, and the concept of whole-life-cycle health management, providing comprehensive, high-level professional care for children’s healthy growth and serving as a steadfast guardian of the health of children and their families.