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“DR. BARBARA BARLOW, A GUARDIAN ANGEL FOR THE CHILDREN” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Transportation was published in the Extensions of Remarks section on pages E962-E963 on May 9, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
DR. BARBARA BARLOW, A GUARDIAN ANGEL FOR THE CHILDREN
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HON. CHARLES B. RANGEL
of new york
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, May 9, 1995
Mr. RANGEL. Mr. Speaker, I would like to bring to your attention and to the attention of my colleagues here in the house, a story about a very dedicated doctor committed to helping save the lives of our children in the Harlem community and beyond.
This guardian angel of which I speak is Dr. Barbara Barlow, chief of Pediatric Surgery at Harlem Hospital Center.
Her push for prevention in helping keep our children on the playgrounds and out of emergency rooms, was depicted recently in a story in Parade Magazine, April 16, 1995.
I am proud to have such a remarkable and devoted individual caring for the children in the Harlem community.
Her Push for Prevention Keeps Kids Out of ER
(By Peter Hellman)
Dr. Barbara Barlow still recalls the 4-year-old boy who arrived at Harlem Hospital Center 20 years ago, soon after she had been appointed chief of pediatric surgery. ``He tumbled head-first out a fourth-floor window while his mother went to answer the phone,'' she told me. ``Multiple fractures. Brain dead. An only child. It was just so incredibly sad.''
Dr. Barlow was then treating an average of one dozen children annually who'd fallen from windows. ``I only saw kids who were still breathing,'' said Barlow. ``Others had been taken directly to the morgue.''
Convinced that ``prevention is better than sewing them up,'' Dr. Barlow decided to get involved. She knew that installing inexpensive window gates would remedy the problem and that a new law required New York City Landlords to install the guards upon request. But compliance was spotty, so Barlow put her energy into a campaign, started by the city's health department, called ``Children Can't Fly.'' Harlem students acted our dramas about window falls. They were sent home from hospital clinics with window-guard request forms. At the culmination of the campaign, ``Children Can't Fly'' balloons were tied to window gates all over Harlem.
The result? Last year, Dr. Barlow treated only one window-fall victim.
If window falls could be so decisively reduced by attacking root causes, reasoned Dr. Barlow, why not also the other kinds of trauma injuries to Harlem's children? Through the mid-1980s, they were being hurt at a rate that was double the national average. Now, thanks to the Injury Prevention Program that Dr. Barlow established in 1988, admissions of children with trauma injuries to Harlem Hospital have been reduced by 44 percent.
Dr. Barlow first focused on Harlem's dirty and dangerous playgrounds. Emergency-room data showed that they caused many injuries. To help upgrade the playgrounds, she persuaded the nonprofit Robert Wood Johnson Foundation of Princeton, N.J., to provide a $240,000 grant. (``A very untraditional use for our money in terms of health care,'' admitted Michael Beachler, a program officer for the foundation.)
Though she was outwardly confident, Dr. Barlow remembers
``lying awake all night and thinking, `What if we can't get anyone to fix these playgrounds'?'' But it turned out Barlow could put people together as well as
[[Page E963]] bodies. With the cooperation of city agencies, schools and volunteer groups (she calls her own role
``coalition-building''), more than a dozen playgrounds were made safer. Metal swings--which too often smashed into children, sometimes fracturing skulls--were replaced by soft rubber ones. Broken climbing bars with jagged points also were replaced. Pocked asphalt, which so easily tripped dashing feet, yielded to rubberized surfaces. Graffiti-strewn walls were painted over with cheerful murals by schoolchildren. Five entirely new playgrounds with Harlem motifs were created.
Dr. Barlow didn't stop there. When a child was raped in the darkness of unkempt Jackie Robinson Park in northern Harlem, where the lights had long been out, she demanded that city officials get the lights back on. Now, Little League teams once again play on the park's renovated fields, and two of the teams are sponsored by Harlem Hospital.
While sports have their place, they can't give a child what gardening can, according to Bernadette Cozart, a gardener for the city parks department. Her ``Greening of Harlem'' project works in cooperation with the Injury Prevention Program. Under Cozart's eye, children fill vacant lots and playground plots with flowers and vegetables. Typical is the garden at P.S. 197, an elementary school. Roses, lilies, tomatoes, eggplants, even collard greens thrive there. ``I have kids who wouldn't eat anything green until they started growing it,'' said Cozart.
Like gardening, the hospital's popular dance program might seem far afield from injury prevention. But time spent dancing is time away from the mean streets of the inner city.
``Why shouldn't these children be loaded up with afterschool activities, just like suburban children are?'' asked Dr. Barlow.
No Harlem child, however, can avoid the streets: 48 percent of pediatric trauma injuries at Harlem Hospital involve motor vehicles. So ``Safety City,'' a course for third-graders on how to be a safe pedestrian, is part of the Injury Prevention Program (aided by the city's department of transportation). Another part of the program is the Urban Youth Bike Corps, which provides helmets and bicycle-repair instruction, while the KISS (Kids, Injuries and Street Smarts) project educates teens about gun violence.
So varied has the Injury Prevention Program become that it's easy to assume Dr. Barlow has little time left for old-fashioned doctoring. That would be a mistake. She still takes a turn of duty every fourth night, though, as a department chief, she doesn't have to.
Dr. Barlow's pioneering program is now going national, thanks to a new $1.1 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Pittsburgh, Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., are the first cities to replicate it. At Harlem Hospital, meanwhile, the surest sign of the continuing downward trend in trauma injuries is a dark corner of the pediatric ward.
``We used to have patients hanging off the rafters when I first came here.'' said Dr. Barlow. ``Now I`ve closed off six beds. We don't need them anymore.''
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