{"id":13322,"date":"2019-02-08T16:18:25","date_gmt":"2019-02-08T16:18:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tmc.edu\/news\/five-questions-for-pediatric-cardiologist-daniel-j-penny-m-d-ph-d\/"},"modified":"2019-08-16T15:04:49","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T15:04:49","slug":"five-questions-for-pediatric-cardiologist-daniel-j-penny-m-d-ph-d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tmc.edu\/news\/2019\/02\/five-questions-for-pediatric-cardiologist-daniel-j-penny-m-d-ph-d\/","title":{"rendered":"Five questions for pediatric cardiologist Daniel J. Penny, M.D., Ph.D."},"content":{"rendered":"
TMC: You were born in Ireland and joined Texas Children\u2019s Hospital<\/a> in 2010 as chief of pediatric cardiology. How did you get from there to here?<\/strong><\/p>\n Penny:<\/strong> I was born in Cork in Ireland and then I went to medical school in Ireland. I knew very early on from my time in medical school that I wanted to be a pediatrician. As I was training as a pediatrician in Ireland, I became fascinated by children with heart disease, and particularly in Ireland, it was very much an underserved specialty; there was really only one pediatric cardiologist in the whole country. So, what I\u2019ve always tried to do is to find the best training opportunities and, ultimately, employment opportunities. In other words: To go to the places I felt were the very best at what they do. So, I left Ireland and went to a hospital in London called the Royal Brompton Hospital<\/a>, which\u2014at that stage\u2014was one of the leaders in the care of children with heart disease. And while I was in London, the people in Melbourne in Australia started to produce results that were really unparalleled. So, I felt that at that stage in my career, if I was really going to continue on in this as a career, I should go to Australia so I could further training there. After a number of years in Australia, I went back to London again to a hospital called The Great Ormond Street Hospital<\/a>, which is a big children\u2019s hospital in London, and then I was asked to be the chief of cardiology at The Royal Children\u2019s Hospital<\/a> back in Melbourne. So, I certainly zig-zagged around a bit.<\/p>\n As somebody who visited the United States frequently when I lived in Australia and in London, I always regarded Texas Children\u2019s Hospital as being the definitive children\u2019s hospital. There was something always very special in my mind about Texas Children\u2019s Hospital, whether it was the history or the caring attitude that was there every time I came to visit. It really felt special to me as an outsider. And so, when I got a call from Dr. Mark Kline to consider coming here, I jumped at the opportunity.<\/p>\n TMC: In 2002, you visited central Vietnam for a lecture and were s0 moved by the experience that you helped build a new local heart institute there. Can you tell me more about the personal mission that was borne from that trip?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Penny:<\/strong> One of the important things that I am very aware of is that\u2014while we can do amazing things for families of children with congenital heart disease in this country\u2014when you look on a global scale, probably up to 90 percent of children with congenital heart disease don\u2019t have access to even the most basic forms of care. I was asked to give some lectures in Vietnam, and while I was giving lectures on the care of children with congenital heart disease, it soon became clear to me that in that part of Vietnam where I was giving these talks, there was really no access to proper care. And so, I worked with some of my colleagues and we ended up getting the funding for a heart institute. But what was as important for us was that we needed to train the staff for this institute. It\u2019s sort of the model of ‘teach a man to fish.’ We felt that if we were going to do anything, it would need to be sustainable and substantial. We then got further funding in order to develop a training program for more than 100 people to staff the cardiovascular institute. And these were surgeons, cardiologists, nurses, pathologists, managers, etc. It was very much the multidisciplinary team that we were training, and the reason for that is that what we do is very programmatic. In other words, for a cardiovascular program, while you obviously need an exceptional surgeon and exceptional cardiologists, if they are not in the right environment and don\u2019t have the right forms of support with other staff and resources, they\u2019re not going to get really good outcomes. …\u00a0I am very proud that this team now in Central Vietnam has started to help train other teams\u2014in Cambodia, for example. So, it goes on.<\/p>\n