MOBILE, Ala. — USA Health Children’s & Women’s Hospital has hired Dr. Casey L. McAtee, a pediatric hematologist-oncologist whose clinical and research career has focused on improving outcomes for children with cancer and blood diseases.
Eight Years in Malawi
For the past eight years, McAtee has worked primarily in Malawi, where he has treated children with cancer and blood disorders while helping develop the infrastructure and clinical expertise needed to improve pediatric cancer care in the world’s most resource-constrained settings.
He has been a faculty member of Global HOPE, a collaboration involving Texas Children’s Hospital, Baylor College of Medicine and medical institutions throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
That background is unusual for a recruit to a regional academic medical center, and it brings a particular kind of expertise. Pediatric oncology in low-resource settings requires physicians to deliver complex, protocol-driven treatment with limited diagnostic capacity, constrained drug supply and long patient travel distances — and to build systems that other clinicians can sustain after they leave.
The skills that work develops — treatment adaptation, program building, training clinical staff and maintaining outcomes under constraint — transfer directly to the problem of extending specialty pediatric care across a largely rural region.
Research and Recognition
McAtee’s research has been published in many academic journals. He most recently received the American Society of Hematology Junior Faculty Scholar Award in clinical research and an Independent Investigator Award from the Rally Foundation for Pediatric Cancer Research.
The ASH Junior Faculty Scholar Award supports early-career investigators in hematology research. The Rally Foundation funds childhood cancer research specifically. Both are competitive awards, and receiving them in the same period indicates an active research program rather than a purely clinical appointment.
A Dual Role
McAtee is also an associate professor of pediatric hematology/oncology at the Frederick P. Whiddon College of Medicine at the University of South Alabama and director of research for that division.
The research directorship is the part of the appointment with the longest time horizon. A division’s research capacity determines whether it can participate in cooperative group clinical trials — the multi-institution studies through which most pediatric cancer treatment advances are tested. Access to those trials is one of the more consequential differences between treatment at a center with an active research program and treatment at one without.
Why It Matters Locally
Pediatric hematology-oncology is a small subspecialty, and practitioners are concentrated at academic children’s hospitals. For families in south Alabama and along the central Gulf Coast, the alternative to local care is generally travel to Birmingham, New Orleans or farther — sustained over months or years of treatment, with everything that implies for work, school and household finances.
Adding a subspecialist to a regional children’s hospital reduces that burden for the families who would otherwise travel.
About the Hospital
USA Health Children’s & Women’s Hospital in Mobile is the region’s dedicated children’s and women’s hospital and is part of USA Health, the academic health system affiliated with the University of South Alabama.