Making the Rounds with Dr. Sherry Bayliff of Kentucky Children's Hospital

For this week’s Making the Rounds, we interviewed Sherry L. Bayliff, MD, MPH, a pediatric hematologist at Kentucky Children’s Hospital. We recently chatted with Dr. Bayliff about the experts at our Vascular Malformation Clinic and the unique, expert care they provide as well as her favorite parts about working with children.

What should we know about the Vascular Malformation Clinic?

It's a unique clinic. It's my special niche here in Kentucky. I have patients from all over the state that come to us to receive services for benign tumors that can be sometimes more complicated or as complicated as some of our cancer diagnoses. In pediatric cancer, our team needs to ensure that we have the latest treatment protocols available to all of our patients. We work through the Children's Oncology Group to ensure that those treatment protocols are available to our families.

From the hemangioma and vascular malformation perspective, a lot of patients come to our clinic because of inability to find answers or needing education so that they can learn more about exactly what their vascular anomaly or their complicated hemangioma may entail for their child. Sometimes it's very scary for them to come to the pediatric hematology oncology clinic because they see children who don't have hair because of chemotherapy, or they see that name oncology in the clinic name and get very concerned that this is something more serious.

How is your team specially equipped to handle these types of complicated diagnoses?

In our hemangioma and vascular malformation clinic, we consider ourselves a multidisciplinary clinic, which is extremely important for complex vascular anomalies and sometimes for very complex and complicated hemangiomas. With our extended team, all of our ancillary support teams with pediatric surgery, with neurosurgery, with our physical therapy, our social workers, all of those folks, including our nurses are just phenomenal in what they do.

We ensure that the families have all of the information they need to make decisions that are going to impact their child's care. We all know healing comes beyond just medicines – it comes from those that support us and those that we have to help us to get through our journey. And that's important when you have a cancer diagnosis.

What’s the best part of your job? What do you like about working with children?

The coolest part of my job is I get to work with kids. And kids are so resilient, they just bring such joy. They can roll with the punches and just keep going and they still look at me as hey, it's Dr. Bayliff, or I can't wait to go see Dr. Bayliff and that's exciting.

I think that in my everyday visits with my patients, one of the best things is that I can get down on the floor and I can talk to them and I can get a better idea of what they are there for is impacting their life. How I can help to make sure that they can do the things they want to do, and be all that they can.

For more information or to schedule an appointment with a provider at the Kentucky Children’s Hospital Vascular Malformation Clinic, call 859-257-4554.

Watch our full interview with Dr. Bayliff.