[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 76 (Tuesday, May 9, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E962-E963]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


         DR. BARBARA BARLOW, A GUARDIAN ANGEL FOR THE CHILDREN

                                 ______


                         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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