As director of the Pediatric Advanced Care Team at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Dr. Jennifer Salant (M.D. ’13) and her interdisciplinary team provide support for children with serious illnesses and their families. If a child needs symptom management or other palliative therapies, she’s there. If a family needs guidance in making complex decisions about their child’s medical journey, she’s there. And if a family is grieving, she’s there, too.
Dr. Salant attributes her passion for supporting children and their families during their most critical and vulnerable moments to her experience as a medical student at Weill Cornell Medicine.
“Helping families achieve peace and dignity during some of the most difficult times is very gratifying for me,” says Dr. Salant, assistant professor of clinical pediatrics at Weill Cornell Medicine and assistant attending pediatrician at NewYork-Presbyterian Komansky Children’s Hospital. “What we do is a really beautiful facet of what can be a very serious side of medicine.”
Dr. Salant is also a pediatric critical care physician who spends part of her days providing medical treatments to children admitted to the pediatric intensive care unit. But her greatest passion — and much of her time — is focused on delivering medical care that aligns with family goals and values so children can live with the highest quality of life in the face of serious illness. The children she sees are very ill, many with advanced cancer, severe infectious diseases, respiratory problems and other potentially life-threatening conditions.
When a child dies, Dr. Salant and her team tend to families’ enormous sadness and confusion. She recently designed a longitudinal pediatric bereavement program that is seeking funding to launch sometime this year. If it does, Weill Cornell Medicine could soon be providing psychosocial bereavement support for families who have lost children, many of whom cannot afford private psychosocial care.
Dr. Salant enjoys helping today’s students develop the same passion for empathy, patience and medical excellence that she herself learned from such mentors as Dr. Susan Bostwick, chief of the Division of General Academic Pediatrics.
“I try to teach my students that no matter what specialty they go into, they’re taking care of people,” says Dr. Salant. “The principles of palliative care are human-centered, and that’s at the core of every physician-patient relationship.”
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