Alberta Children’s Hospital

About Alberta Children’s Hospital

The Alberta Children’s Hospital (ACH) believes in innovation and collaboration. We support the publication of our pediatric clinical care guidelines (ACH PCCG), in the interest of facilitating information sharing and partnership widely with other physicians, in order to raise the standard of care, and to deliver the best possible outcomes for the patients and families we serve.

The ACH is a 150-bed free standing children’s hospital in Calgary, Alberta, Canada that contains a 14-bed neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), a 15-bed pediatric intensive care unit (PICU), and large pediatric emergency department with nearly 100,000 visits per annum and has access to most pediatric medical and surgical subspecialties. It is academically affiliated with the Department of Pediatrics, University of Calgary.

The province of Alberta has a population of 4.43 million (2020) and the ACH services the southern half of the province. Pediatric cardiovascular surgical services are centralized at the Stollery Children’s Hospital in the north, but children’s bone marrow transplant services are all provided at the ACH.

The ACH is a member of Solutions for Patient Safety (SPS) (see SPS data on the Reports page).

ACH Pediatric Intensive Care Unit

This website began it life as an internal pediatric critical care guidelines website. The ACH Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) is a 15-bed medical and surgical PICU. Around 900 children from ages 1 day (once discharged home after birth) to 18 years are admitted per annum. Overall mortality is 2%, with average LOS of 4 days (see VPS data for more detail on the Reports page).

The portion of invasively ventilated cases to non-invasively ventilated to not ventilated is 1/3 to 1/3 to 1/3. As such, the ACH does not have a high dependency or intermediate care unit, but there is a separate long term complex airway support unit. 

The ACH PICU also provides the following programs:

  • Within PICU: Continuous renal replacement and plasmapheresis (CRRT), rescue extracorporeal life support (ECLS) and extracorporeal cardiopulmonary resuscitation (ECPR), Pain/Agitation/Delerium Prevention Program (PAD).
  • Outside PICU: Emergency response team (Code Blue) and PICU follow-up and outreach team (STEP), clinical incident stress management service (CISM), complex patient transfer process team (EFFECT), and IV insertion team.
  • Beyond ACH: Pediatric critical care transport team (PCCTT).

To view more details on ACH PICU programs, see the Programs page.

Hospital and ICU Outcomes

View VPS data, SPS data and other QA data on the Reports page.