When kids at Children's Wisconsin need heart surgery or another heart procedure, they have a special doctor to help them stay asleep and safe. This doctor is called a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist. An anesthesiologist's main job is to make sure kids are sleeping and comfortable during their operation or test. They also help kids with heart problems who need other kinds of surgeries, like getting their tonsils out. They even help adults with congenital heart disease.

Children's Wisconsin is one of the few hospitals that has dedicated pediatric cardiac anesthesiologists who only work with kids' hearts. They are an integral part of the overall pediatric anesthesiology team at Children's Wisconsin.

Pediatric anesthesiologists are the main doctors watching over your child. If something happens where every second counts, they know exactly what to do for a child with a heart problem. They use special machines to check that your child's breathing, brain, and blood flow are working as well as possible. If anything seems wrong, they immediately work with the surgery team to fix it.

These doctors are highly trained to give special care to children while they are asleep. They also stay involved in your child's care after the surgery as your child wakes up in the post-anesthesia care unit.

The pediatric cardiac anesthesiologists at Children's Wisconsin have a lot of extra training. After medical school, they spend at least four to five more years learning to become experts.

These doctors are certified and have special training in many areas, including how to give anesthesia to kids and how to care for them in a critical situation. All of them specialize in helping babies, children, and even adults who have heart conditions that make using anesthesia complicated. They have a great deal of knowledge and experience with anesthesia, pain medication, and how a patient's body responds to them.

Our team also uses the best methods to make sure care is given as quickly and efficiently as possible, 24 hours a day. They have systems and plans in place to ensure all necessary equipment, medications, and data are ready for every procedure.

The pediatric anesthesiologists at Children's Wisconsin, like their colleagues in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, have a great track record with special monitoring methods. They go beyond the usual ways to check a child's vital signs and also measure brain activity, how well their kidneys are working, and their blood oxygen levels during and after a procedure.

Doctors at Children's Wisconsin were actually the first in the country to publish proof that constantly monitoring blood oxygen levels using a method called near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) can greatly improve a child's health, especially their brain development. This commitment to improving surgical results has helped Children's Wisconsin achieve the best results in the world for hypoplastic left heart syndrome.