As Chair/Chief of the Department of Paediatrics, I would like to welcome you to the Department of Paediatrics at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry in London, Ontario. As a department, we feel it is important to provide a comprehensive website as a helpful tool to document both to the community as well as to students and faculty that we are one of Ontario and Canada's leading centres for children's health care, teaching and research.

The Department of Paediatrics exists to foster child health and teaching for physicians and other health care professionals and supports the delivery of specialized paediatric services to children in Southwestern Ontario. We are unique for a rural and urban mix in our catchment area that reflects the nation as a whole. A strong regional network enables us to provide incidence and prevalence data for health issues of our children and youth. Knowledge about the changing trends and threats to the health of our youth is essential to combat the many challenges that threaten to shorten the life expectancy of our youth after 150 years of steadily improved life expectancy.

The epidemiological basis forms the platform for the second strength, namely one of the leading paediatric pharmacology programs in North America. It is our goal to reduce the large proportion (75%) of drugs that have never been adequately studied in children. Our strong trauma program compliments the efforts to combat the most important reason for mortality in children and youth, together with prevention programs. This is all for a common vision amongst our comprehensive, interdisciplinary team of medical professionals: to retain and recruit extraordinary child health teaching and research faculty and make a difference for children and our future citizens.

Unique to London is the strong integration of paediatric specialized programs into comprehensive academic tertiary hospitals within London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC) and St. Josephs Health Care. However, we are striving towards combining these services in a united Children's Hospital in the new North Tower of the LHSC. Here we will form a unit together with Department of Obstetrics, thus enabling us to study fetal programming of disease later in life. With the integration of basic sciences, we truly are geared towards mastering translational research throughout maternity and childhood. At the same time we are fortunate to network with a number of regionally based services that provide an excellent foundation for teaching and research.

The Department of Paediatrics offers a nationally competitive residency program, internationally recognized fetal neonatal health programs. The specialized paediatric clinical pharmacology program remains the only one of its kind in the region.

It is our vision to continue providing unique child health education and services in Southwestern Ontario, operating within a provincial network for the delivery of specialized care. Personal pride comes from the knowledge that we continue to recruit and retain outstanding faculty committed to academic pursuits in child health.

Guido Filler,

Chief/Chair, Department of Paediatrics, UWO