Making incredible strides toward improving cardiac health in Corpus Christi, Dr. Stephen Langley has a passion for serving the Coastal Bend. When he arrived at Driscoll Children’s Hospital in 2019, the cardiac intensive care unit had zero dedicated beds for children. Six years later, the care unit has 35 beds.
Langley, who hails from a small fishing village on the southern coast of England, has moved from one coast to another to help build one of the country’s fastest-growing pediatric heart programs, serving as Chief of Pediatric and Congenital Cardiac Surgery. He did not set out to build the fastest-growing program, but his arrival helped make it happen.
After receiving his medical degree in London, his career brought him across the Atlantic—first to Oregon, then to Florida before arriving at Driscoll Children’s Hospital.
“I was super, super excited to start here,” Langley said of his first days at Driscoll, and there were a few reasons. Driscoll treated only children, something his previous hospitals were not dedicated to. The Coastal Bend, meanwhile, had long been what could be considered a medical desert, particularly for specialized pediatric care. And the hospital’s administration wanted to build a world-class heart center. Langley was keen to be part of it all.
“I don’t see why a child in California, or Boston, or Michigan, should have any better care than they should in South Texas,” Langley shared.
The results are worth lauding. Driscoll’s Heart Center has tripled its surgical volume over five years, now reaching 32 counties across a service area roughly the size of South Carolina. When asked what the next five-year plan looks like for Driscoll, Langley expressed excitement for the future of constant progression.
“There’s no destination here. It’s about getting better constantly. It’s about having a culture of getting better,” he said.
And better the hospital has gotten. According to Driscoll’s own outcomes data, it is outperforming national averages for post-surgical length of stay, resulting from highly specialized diagnosis, collaborative presurgical planning, a quality of technical repair and exceptional post-operative care. For a complex single-ventricle procedure, the Norwood procedure, Driscoll patients go home after 20 days on average, against a national median of 52. Providing such complex care at a standard that is beating national averages is a culture change that happens from within.
Building that culture has required a team with members beyond surgeons. In the past four years alone, Driscoll recruited 110 additional nurses to its cardiac intensive care unit. Langley is quick to address how his function is only possible with his team, praising their work and how the nurses, respiratory therapists, physicians and administrators are all responsible for the growth of the program and improvement.
As for why Langley feels so passionate about pediatric heart care, he responded not with a mission statement, but from the heart. “They didn’t choose to be born like that,” he said of children with congenital heart disease. “They didn’t deserve it. They just arrived.”
The work goes beyond repairing a heart. The team understands that with each procedure, an entire family is involved and must also receive care and comfort. As a father himself, that fact is not lost on Langley.
As a transplant from England, Langley mentioned how he has a place in his heart for Corpus Christi. This was a small admission, almost beside the point, but it came from a man who has been building something special with his team for the past six years. Here in the Coastal Bend, we are excited to see what the next five years bring.
