Heart Transplant Program

Post-operative intensive care

Heart and lung

Following heart and lung transplants, children recover under close monitoring in the  Cardiac Intensive Care Unit (CICU) on 8 South of the Main building.

• Our CICU is a 24-bed facility.
• Between 1,200 and 1,300 patients are admitted to the unit each year.

Patient safety and quality assurance are priorities in our CICU, with regular reviews of all practices and procedures. The attending physicians on staff work full time in the CICU and have training in specialty areas, including pediatric critical care, cardiology and cardiac anesthesia.

Their knowledge, together with sophisticated monitoring and support equipment, enables them to recognize problems quickly and respond effectively.

Liver, Kidney, Intesine and Multivisceral

After a child has a kidney, liver, intestine or multivisceral transplant, he or she is admitted to the Medical/Surgical Intensive Care Unit on 7 South of the Main building. (Some kidney recipients are admitted to the Post-Anesthesia Recovery Unit, rather than intensive care.)

Specially trained pediatric intensivists, nurses and a host of support staff care for more than 2,000 critically ill children annually in the MSICU, from newborn to college-age, across the entire spectrum of childhood disease.

• The unit serves as one of the largest extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) centers in the United States
• The MSICU houses the first hospital-based simulator suite in a Boston teaching hospital, enhancing training of critical care physicians and nurses in crisis resource management.