Mirna Giordano
What happens when a physician steps outside the system she knows and begins to observe another, not as a critic, but as a learner? In this episode, Faculty Visitor Dr. Mirna Giordano reflects on what a visit to Paris’s leading children’s hospitals has revealed about how pediatric care is organized, communicated, and experienced across two very different healthcare cultures.
A pediatric hospitalist and faculty at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Dr. Giordano has spent over two decades co‑managing pediatric neurosurgical patients and researching opioid‑sparing treatment outcomes. She discusses the emergence of pediatric hospital medicine as a subspecialty in the United States, the structural and legal forces that shape documentation practices, the growing medical complexity of children who survive extreme prematurity and chronic disease, and the more fluid team dynamics she observed at Necker and Bicêtre hospitals in Paris. She also reflects on what it means to practice medicine as a calling, and on returning from her Reid Hall Faculty Visitorship carrying something she had not anticipated: the desire to do things a little differently.
Atelier is produced by the Columbia Global Paris Center, a Columbia University initiative housed at Reid Hall.
Mirna Giordano is a pediatric hospitalist with a particular interest in surgical co-management. She has co-managed pediatric neurosurgical patients for over 10 years. Her clinical research is in outcomes related to opioid-sparing multi modal analgesia.
She is currently involved as a Steering Committee member with NYC Collaborative of Pediatric Hospitalists and is a Chair of Opioid Crisis Committee AAP Chapter 3. She also serves on the Executive Council of Pediatric SIG at SHM and contributes as a co-chair of education sub-committee.
