>When a family learns a child’s diagnosis, the first place they may turn to is Google. Suddenly they are faced with endless amounts of information that can be difficult to navigate. Thankfully, because of generous donor support, the Family and Community Resource Centre (FCRC) is a hub at the hospital that offers credible information and resources to help families adjust to their new reality and learn about their child’s condition. In addition to providing connections to health and community resources, the FCRC also offers family peer support, translation services, recreational toys and books for kids as well as technology for children in hospital through the Child and Youth Interactive Media Program (CHIMP).

The Goal: To ensure all children and families have access to the information, technology and people that support care and decision-making.

In 2024-25, the library saw a record high number of books and Kindles signed out to patients and families. Meanwhile the CHIMP team began one-on-one adaptive video game sessions to help patients attending the Gordon Townsend School meet their rehabilitation goals.

Families often find themselves suddenly navigating unfamiliar territory while managing stress, uncertainty, and complex medical information. Donor-funded programs such as the Special Children’s Fund and Emily’s Backyard — a free, child-minding service at the hospital for patients and their siblings — provide practical and emotional support during difficult times.

The Goal: To ensure all families get the wrap-around support they need to help manage a child’s health journey.

In 2024-25, nearly 6,500 requests for financial relief were answered, providing more than $500,000 in assistance to families while Emily’s Backyard saw a 17 percent increase in visits compared to the previous year. Looking ahead, Emily’s Backyard looks to advance staff skills and knowledge to support a growing population of children with complex behavioural and medical needs. As this demographic grows, this expertise, strengthened through training sessions and discussions with child-minding centres and caregiver organizations across Canada, will help ensure local families receive the care they need, now and in the future. Read more highlights from 2024/25.

Long hospital stays can weigh heavy on young patients, which is why specialists at the Alberta Children’s Hospital work with kids to find a release valve for the pressures that can build. These include the Beads of Courage program, Music Therapy, Art Therapy, Horticulture Therapy, special events and more – all designed to support physical, mental and emotional healing while providing a fun distraction and social interaction for kids during their time in or at the hospital.

The Goal: To support the physical, mental and emotional healing of all kids and to reduce the anxiety and potential trauma that can be associated with serious sickness and injury.

Read more about how your support of Patient and Family Centred Care changed lives in 2024/25.

Donations from generous supporters play a crucial role in ensuring the Alberta Children’s Hospital has the latest medical equipment to provide the best possible care for kids. From advanced imaging technology to specialized surgical tools, these vital investments help doctors and caregivers diagnose, treat, and support young patients more effectively.

Critical illness or injury are not confined to the Calgary area. Children throughout Alberta, southeastern British Columbia and southwestern Saskatchewan face life-threatening health crises, too. For those living in rural centres without immediate access to expert pediatric care, the Pediatric Critical Care Transport (PCCT) Team from the Alberta Children’s Hospital is their lifeline. Created in 2012 thanks to donations from the community, the Transport team is comprised of critical care physicians, nurses and respiratory therapists who work together like a mobile ICU unit, providing life-saving care during emergency transports by ground or air. In addition to longer distance transports, the team is also called upon to keep severely sick or injured children safe when they need to be transferred to other areas of the hospital.

The Goal: To provide highly specialized care for critically ill or injured pediatric patients requiring emergent or urgent transportation to the Alberta Children’s Hospital, while improving outcomes and reducing mortality, and to support and disseminate pediatric critical care knowledge and education to hospital Emergency Departments, especially in rural communities, by providing in-person and virtual training.

Did You Know? The nurses and respiratory therapists who work on the transport team have incredibly specialized skills, including the ability to intubate or start an IV on tiny patients in a moving ambulance, airplane or helicopter. In 2024/25, the team implemented an education system to further develop these skills and is now recognized by Accreditation Canada, meeting gold-standards at both national and global levels. Read more highlights from 2024/25.

Located next door to the Alberta Children’s Hospital, Rotary Flames House is one of only six pediatric hospices in Canada and the only one in Alberta.

Modeled after a two-storey home, it is designed to be a place of sanctuary for families and children. Care is provided 24 hours a day, seven days a week by a team of trained healthcare professionals committed to ensuring that each child and family’s physical, developmental, emotional, spiritual and cultural needs are met in a sensitive and compassionate manner. Community donations support services that include respite care, end-of-life care, symptom management, transition care, grief support and bereavement care.

The Goal: To be a home away from home for medically complex children, where they can enjoy fun experiences and special programming tailored to them while their parents rest and recharge. It’s also a place of comfort for parents treasuring final moments with a child and where they can gather with others grieving unimaginable losses, all while surrounded by supportive and loving caregivers.

In 2024/25, the House welcomed a new Nurse Practitioner and a Clinical Nurse Educator to help support families, giving physicians capacity to meet more children in the community who may require palliative care. These specialists have also begun to expand their consultative services and outreach to family physicians and pediatricians across southern Alberta. Provincially, they are also leading a training program for homecare workers, neonatal and pediatric intensive care staff, and hospital inpatient teams, providing coaching on difficult conversations around end-of-life care and complex decision making. And with the welcoming of a new Recreational Therapist, therapeutic programming has been expanded to ensure engaging and fun activities are offered to children during the weekends, too. Additional grief and bereavement counselling is now available, including a new program for bereaved siblings.
Read more highlights from 2024/25.

Current therapies for cancer, as well as life-threatening blood and immune disorders, can be incredibly taxing – both physically and mentally – on children and their families. To help ease some of their hardship, community support enables specialists to provide a whole new level of family centred care through Hospital at Home – the first program of its kind for children in Canada. This service sends specially trained nurses to administer certain medications, chemotherapies and supportive therapies to patients in the comfort of their own homes.

The Goal: To reduce patient and family stress, to increase satisfaction and quality of life for patients, and to reduce inpatient stays for patients cared for by the Hospital at Home team.

In 2024/25, thanks to generous community support, even more capacity has been added to this incredible program, broadening its services and providing care to patients and families previously beyond the program’s reach. This expanded capacity includes Home Away from Home, a partnership with Ronald McDonald House Charities. This new arrangement allows patients who are staying at any of the suites within the newly expanded Ronald McDonald House — adjacent to the Alberta Children’s Hospital — to receive Hospital at Home care. This means the comfort provided by this service now extends to those who must come to stay in Calgary from outside of the city. Generous community support has also increased appointment capacity for services on weekends. Read more highlights from 2024/25.

Thanks to a partnership among Alberta Health Services, the University of Calgary, the Alberta Children’s Hospital Foundation and thousands of generous donors, The Summit: Marian & Jim Sinneave Centre for Youth Resilience, Calgary’s first community-based mental health centre for young people, is now open.

The Goal: To augment and integrate with the overall continuum of care currently provided through the Alberta Health Services Child & Adolescent Addiction, Mental Health and Psychiatry Program and other important community agencies, and provides families with greater access to timely assessments, intervention and therapy, and help reduce admissions and lengths of hospital stays for children and teens.

Located at 1015 – 17 Street NW, the Summit provides three new resources for kids, teens, and their families: the Owerko Family Walk In Services, the Tallman Family Treatment Services and the Ptarmigan Day Hospital. These services and other programs provide mental health support for young people to help them address issues as early as possible. The Summit opened its doors on March 13, 2023.

Owerko Family Walk In Services

Owerko Family Walk In Services offers no-cost therapy sessions for children, youth and families who need help with specific issues and possible solutions. These services are available from 9 am to 9 pm, seven days per week.

Tallman Family Treatment Services

Tallman Family Treatment Services helps young people manage acute escalating symptoms to help prevent or reduce the need for hospitalization. This is a “step-up” program. Patients are referred to this service from community clinics if they are not experiencing improvements in how they are managing.

Ptarmigan Day Hospital

The Ptarmigan Day Hospital is the city’s first pediatric mental health day hospital, helping youth transition from around-the-clock inpatient care to eight to 10 hours of daily intensive therapy in a community setting.

Read more highlights from 2024/25.

For more information about The Summit, its programs and services, visit Alberta Health Services.

Thanks to our generous community, the Emerging Adult Mental Health initiative has co-created and implemented a new and improved model of care with and for young people aged 16–29 in our community. In 2021, a team of clinicians and researchers with expertise in child, adolescent and adult psychiatry, psychology, social work and adolescent medicine set out to address significant gaps in knowledge and services for the emerging adult (EA) population. Over four years, with input from young people and their families, this initiative re-examined and redesigned services and treatments to meet the needs of a population at a pivotal juncture in their psychological, neurobiological and social-emotional development.

In 2024/25, 681 emerging adults received care from the program. With improved coordination and streamlining, the wait time for the initial orientation is now less than 90 days, a vast improvement from the more than one year. Looking ahead, the team is seeking to establish the Emerging Adult Central Innovation Hub (EACIH) from which to spread the new Emerging Adult Service across the city and into rural Alberta thus providing greater access to those seeking care. The EACIH will offer additional multidisciplinary services including Peer Support, Occupational Therapy and Psychological assessment. Clients will be able to access these services in person or virtually thus minimizing the barriers to receiving care. Read more Emerging Adult Mental Health highlights from 2024/25.

In 2005, our generous community helped establish the KidSIM Pediatric Simulation program at the Alberta Children’s Hospital, an invaluable resource for medical experts, families, and schools. And in 2014, donors helped build a new state-of-the-art KidSIm Centre. It has become one of the premiere simulation programs in the world with impacts realized on a local, provincial, national, and international scale and crosses the areas of education, patient safety, clinical research and patient and family centred care. Through KidSIM, caregivers practice real-time, emergency scenarios on high-fidelity, life-like mannequins to keep their skills as sharp as possible. Family members of children with complex medical needs and other significant people in their lives, such as teachers, can also learn to handle emergency situations. This allows many children and families a new level of independence and quality of life, reducing their reliance on hospital care.

The Goal: To ensure hospital experts and families are prepared for the wide range of life-saving challenges they may face at any given moment on any given day.

In 2024/25, the donor-funded KidSIM program marked 20 years of supporting families and care providers. Since January 2014, the KidSIM Centre has been a vital training and education space for 80,000 learners. The space’s versatility has allowed it to serve the diverse needs of clinical, academic and research groups, including clinical education and training, faculty development, research, advocacy, family-centered care and community outreach. The program has become a global leader in pediatric simulation research and is the most published simulation program in the world.

KidSIM continues to develop new education programs to support health care providers, as well as continuing to expand and grow family-centered care offerings to support children, families, caregivers, bus drivers and schools in the community.

Time is of the essence when determining causes and treatments for a child’s illness. Thanks to your generous support, specialists at the Alberta Children’s Hospital are using point-of-care ultrasound (PoCUS) to inform care in real time, helping them make faster diagnoses with increased accuracy so children can begin treatments sooner.

Until recently, ultrasounds were only available in the Diagnostic Imaging department and were performed by an ultrasound technician, which limited the accessibility of the testing. Now, a robust pediatric-specific training and education platform called KidSONO is expanding knowledge and skills for staff to use PoCUS across the hospital, starting with the Emergency Department, Intensive Care and inpatient units.

In 2024/25, physicians reported increased confidence when using PoCUS to support their decision-making, especially in time-sensitive scenarios. The ability to perform cleaner, more accurate scans — bolstered by hands-on training and ongoing support — has helped reduce diagnostic uncertainty and improved overall quality of care delivered at the bedside. Improvements in workflows have enhanced patient care by reducing the time to formal ultrasound and intervention, leading to quicker treatment and improved patient outcomes. Read more KidSONO highlights from 2024/25.

The Summit is home to Canada’s first evidence-based pharmacogenetic testing service in youth mental health. Using a patient’s DNA collected from saliva, researchers are able to look for biomarkers that can inform decisions around medications for anxiety and depression, allowing clinicians to better match medications to individual children and teens, reducing adverse reactions and improving outcomes. What used to take months or even years to identify the right medication and dosage now takes just weeks or even days, meaning more kids are feeling better, sooner.

Children affected by conditions like stroke, spinal cord injury, or cerebral palsy can face significant challenges with movement and communication. Though fully aware and cognitively capable, many are unable to walk, speak, or use their hands, which can limit their ability to express themselves and interact with the world around them.

Thanks to generous community support, BCI technology at the Alberta Children’s Hospital is continuously evolving — and changing kids’ lives. BCI recognizes changes in thought patterns and brain activity, while a headset translates those thoughts into signals that result in an action, like playing a song, moving a toy car or even painting a canvas.

In 2024/25, the BCI4Kids team at the hospital hosted collaborative workshops to create a five-year roadmap to address barriers to accessing this technology, bringing researchers closer to the first implant for a child with a pediatric-onset condition. Read more BCI highlights from 2024/25.