El Paso Children's Hospital has received accreditation from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, making it the first designated cystic fibrosis care center in the region and giving local kids and their families access to specialized treatment without leaving the state. The hospital's cystic fibrosis center currently cares for 27 families, and officials say that number is expected to grow as referrals come in.
Cystic fibrosis is a genetic disease that affects the lungs, pancreas, and other organs, according to the Mayo Clinic, causing mucus and other secretions to become sticky and thick and plugging pathways in the lungs. Before this designation, as reported by KDBC, Dr. Denease Francis said patients previously traveled several hours to Albuquerque and Dallas for specialized cystic fibrosis care. That travel burden was severe: families heading to the nearest accredited centers faced round-trip drives of roughly 540 miles to Albuquerque or 1,260 miles to Dallas, according to Meetways travel data.
Dr. Francis is a pediatric gastroenterologist at El Paso Children's Hospital, and the station's report notes the new designation expands treatment options for children dealing with both stomach and lung issues tied to the disease. The accredited center is built around collaborative care, with clinicians seeing and discussing patients together rather than in siloed appointments — a structure the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation requires of all its accredited sites, which must field a synchronized team of pediatric pulmonologists, gastroenterologists, dietitians, respiratory therapists, social workers, and clinical coordinators, per New York State Department of Health accreditation guidance.
A Regional First for West Texas Families
The new El Paso center joins a nationwide network of more than 130 care centers and 53 affiliate programs that the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation accredits and funds, requiring annual evaluations and periodic site visits to keep their designation, per the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Before El Paso's accreditation, Texas's CF-accredited centers were clustered hundreds of miles away in Austin, Corpus Christi and Dallas, leaving West Texas without a dedicated site. The El Paso center can now care for patients from El Paso, Juarez, Mexico, and Las Cruces, New Mexico, according to the same KDBC report.
Dr. Endy Dominguez, a pediatric pulmonologist and chief of the department of pediatrics at El Paso Children's Hospital, hopes to establish a comprehensive center serving both children and adults. The hospital is currently incorporating adult cystic fibrosis patients into its pediatric services while it works toward that goal, and it plans to eventually build separate comprehensive centers for adults and children.
Why More Patients Are Living Into Adulthood
That push toward adult care reflects a national shift. Close to 40,000 people in the United States live with cystic fibrosis, and more than half of them are now adults, with over 3,000 individuals reaching age 50 or older as of 2025, according to Cystic Fibrosis Foundation patient registry data. The foundation's registry also shows the predicted median survival age for U.S. infants born with the disease between 2020 and 2024 reached 65 years, up sharply from 37 years for those born in the early 2000s — a leap that has turned what was once considered a fatal childhood illness into a chronic condition managed across a lifetime.
El Paso Children's Hospital officials say the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's backing will also allow the center to conduct more research in the Borderland, with planned work focused on the Hispanic population and cystic fibrosis genetics. That focus addresses a documented gap in care: a cross-sectional analysis of Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Patient Registry data published in Pediatric Pulmonology found that only 75.6% of Hispanic cystic fibrosis patients carry gene mutations eligible for disease-modifying CFTR modulator therapies, compared to 92.4% of non-Hispanic white patients, according to research indexed on PubMed.
A Documented Disparity in Outcomes
The stakes behind that genetic gap are stark. A long-term study by the Stanford University School of Medicine tracking California residents with cystic fibrosis found that Hispanic patients were nearly three times as likely to die from the condition as non-Hispanic white patients, with researchers noting that Hispanic CF patients frequently carry rare gene mutations that have received less research attention. Texas mandates two newborn blood spot screenings to detect 29 genetic conditions including cystic fibrosis, but nationwide studies show screening panels miss a higher proportion of Hispanic infants because those panels were historically built around variants common in non-Hispanic white populations, according to Texas Department of State Health Services guidance.
El Paso Children's Hospital opened in February 2012 after a $120 million voter-approved bond in 2007, and it operates as a 122-bed non-profit facility that remains the only separately licensed pediatric hospital within a 350-mile radius. The new cystic fibrosis accreditation builds on other recent efforts by the hospital to close gaps in specialty care for Borderland families, including its rural mobile clinic launch and its ongoing recruitment push amid long specialist wait times for local kids, as per Hoodline. For families who once faced day-long drives just to see a specialist, the accreditation means that comprehensive cystic fibrosis care is now available close to home.
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