intensive-care unit. In 2007, Providence House published More Than a Place: The Origins of a Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt by Lisa A. DuBois. More Than a Place traces the development of the children's hospital from its genesis as the Junior League Home for Crippled Children to its establishment as a premiere children's hospital, detailing how the hospital's advocates battled racism, religious differences, politicians, academics, lawsuits, and hospital administration in addition to disease and pain to ensure that children in middle Tennessee were served by a medical facility dedicated to them. About The freestanding Monroe Carell Jr. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt opened on February 8, 2004. Receiving over 375,000 pediatric cases per year, with 15,000 inpatients and 357,000+ treated in the emergency and outpatient departments, the not-for-profit hospital provides pediatric health care regardless of ability to pay. Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt is equipped with 343 licensed inpatient beds, including 119 in its neonatal intensive care unit and 61 devoted to critical care (pediatric intensive care unit and pediatric cardiac intensive care unit). It has 42 emergency department rooms, three surgical locations and 21 operating rooms. In its 2021 fiscal year, Children's Hospital at Vanderbilt recorded 35,511 emergency department visits; 369,914 clinic visits; 26,048 telehealth visits; and 18,180 surgeries. Research and innovations In 1961, Dr. Mildred Stahlman pioneered the first newborn intensive care unit (NICU) in the country to use monitored respiratory therapy on infants with damaged lungs. On Oct. 31, 1961, a baby girl was born at Vanderbilt hospital two months prematurely and gasping for breath. With the permission of her parents, Martha H. Lott was placed into the negative-pressure breathing machine Dr. Stahlman modified from an infant "iron-lung" machine to keep her sufficiently ventilated until her lungs could develop for her to breathe on her own. Today, Ms. Lott fights on behalf of newborns with similar stories to her own as a nurse in the NICU. In 1972, with funding from a Regional Medical Program (RMP) grant, Vanderbilt initiated its Pediatric and Neonatal Transport (originally called 'Angel Transport') service. The first mobile neonatal and pediatric critical care transport of its kind, its Pediatric Transport Team consists of a neonatal nurse practitioner, a neonatal respiratory therapist, a neonatal registered nurse, an emergency medical technician, and a driver able to double as an assistant. The transport vehicles are equipped with ventilators and monitoring equipment including a blood gas analyzer that enable it