Chair of Pediatrics orchestrates multiple ensembles of care at Golisano’s Children’s Hospital at UK HealthCare
LEXINGTON — For Scottie Day, MD, bringing together a medical team to manage a child’s treatment is more like being a maestro than an administrator.
“Anytime a sick child is in our ICU, there will probably be multiple specialists involved. So, in many ways, I always feel like we’re kind of the conductor of the orchestra,” he says of his job as physician-in-chief of Golisano Children’s Hospital at UK. “It’s our job and our responsibility…to bring that symphony together, to make sure the song that’s being played is in tune, and the parents can hear it and understand it.”
Day is not only the physician-in chief, he’s also vice-president of Children’s Health at UK HealthCare and a pediatric critical care specialist. While he sees medicine as his calling now, at one point, he looked to playing real songs as a career.
At the age of five, Day started playing piano. Soon after, other musical instruments came. Then came a band and playing music at festivals, community events and weddings. Day taught piano lessons and traveled the state for marching band competitions. He knew from an early age, he says, that he was either going into music or medicine.
Born in Leslie County, Kentucky, in the Appalachian mountains, Day was the youngest of two sons of a coal miner. After graduating from high school, he attended Hazard Community College before transferring to the University of Kentucky to get his bachelor’s degree in biology. From there he received his medical degree at the UK College of Medicine, and completed his residency at Indiana University, Indianapolis and his fellowship in critical care at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Between 2008 and 2011, he was on the cardiopulmonary resuscitation committees at both Indiana University and Kaiser Moanalua Hospital, Honolulu, Hawaii. He also helped develop the Pediatric Early Warning System (PEWS) at Kaiser Moanalua Hospital.
In 2011, Day came to UK HealthCare and is a team leader for Golisano Children’s at UK and a core member of UK HealthCare Congenital Heart Taskforce. Following this role, Day became ACMO for the children’s hospital where he was involved in several initiatives including key partnerships for children’s care.
New Name. Expanded Mission.
Kentucky Children’s Hospital became Golisano Children’s Hospital at UK in October of 2025 when entrepreneur and philanthropist Tom Golisano, founder of Paychex, donated $50 million to UK and UK HealthCare to transform pediatric health care in Kentucky. The funds will support UK’s mission to improve the health of Kentucky’s children through access to advanced care, officials say, while enhancing research and expanding education opportunities for health care professionals in Kentucky and beyond.
In recognition of the gift, UK renamed and its complex care and development specialty clinics and affiliate network – including AdventHealth Manchester, CHI Saint Joseph Health – London, Clark Regional Medical Center, Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center, Georgetown Community Hospital, Lake Cumberland Regional Hospital, Pikeville Medical Center, Rockcastle Regional Hospital, UK King’s Daughters, and UK St. Claire. The goal, officials say, is to improve UK Children’s Hospital and to grow and cultivate its affiliate network and other programs throughout the state.
Golisano Children’s Hospital at UK has more than 210 beds across six units and includes several specialty units and programs for pediatrics.
The need for the expanded network is clear. In just four years, the hospital has continued to see growth. In 2022, the hospital network had 7,111 patient discharges, a number that climbed to 7,625 in 2024. In 2025, there were 7,345 patient discharges, a three percent increase over 2022’s patient volume.
Healing the Sickest of the Sick
For Scottie Day, four things are more important than anything else – faith, family, friends, and purpose. The aligning of his career with those four key elements make medicine more than just a job. He considers it a calling.
“A lot of it is driven by my faith,” he says. “I feel very much on a mission and that allows me to do what I get to do. It’s interesting, because sometimes the mission changes over time, but one of the things that I enjoy most is the interactions that I get to have with the families and the people.”
It’s a passion he shares with his wife, Kristi, whom he met in medical school. Together with their four kids, they decided that Lexington was where they wanted to settle down. After 20 years in medicine, Kristi has started her own medical path, opening Rooted Health, LLC, a solo concierge women-only, faith-based practice in Lexington.
Day says he and his wife were both drawn to taking care of children.
“Out of medical school, I chose medical pediatrics which meant I could take care of adults and kids and be able to take care of them across the hospital spectrum,” he says. “My wife and I both chose it because we love the interaction with that particular group. When I was living in Indianapolis, I said, ‘Man, I want to be able to take care of the sickest of the sickest kids. I love taking care of kids, and honestly, I like taking care of the sickest of the sickest kids, because the majority of them get better.'”
Once they decided to come to Kentucky, the selections narrowed for him. His desire to be in pediatrics ICU limited his choices at that time to UofL Health or UK. Being a Wildcat fan, the choice from there was simple, he says.
Now, in his current position, he wears a number of hats. On one hand, he oversees the academic and educational responsibilities for the department of Pediatrics. He also serves as physician-in-chief for Golisano’s Children’s Hospital at UK, which puts him in a position to oversee other physicians and all of the clinical programs in pediatrics.
His new role as vice-president helps him bring people together to improve the health of children in Kentucky, he says.
“I’m excited about all the jobs, but the vice president position allows me to look across the health of all the children that are touched in some way by the University of Kentucky and UK HealthCare,” he says. “I’m not necessarily an expert in anything, in my opinion. But I’m good at being able to connect and relate to people. I feel very fortunate to do that now, while I am still a practicing doctor. I have these scrubs on, and later I’ll be taking call in the ICU, because that’s what I worked my whole life for… to take care of really sick kids in the ICU, at the best ICU in the country.”
Pediatric Specialists Consult on Complex Cases
One of the benefits of the program, he says, is not only that patients and their families will get the expertise they need to get better, but that there will be a wide variety of other doctors reviewing the case to ensure the best outcomes. It’s a program he believes in.
“It’s a very well-oiled machine makes sure that the kids get the care they need,” he says. “In my philosophy, every program here should be good enough that I would take my own kids here personally, and I do. They’ve been here multiple times.”
Part of the challenge, he says, is to get the many different voices that the patients hear all in tune with one another.
“Sometimes we have families come out and we’ll have multiple people at the bedside talking about something, and we’ll have five or six specialists and the ICU docs, and not everybody’s going to agree,” he says. “I tell the parents that we will come to consensus. What they may see as disagreement is these people using their expertise, and they can guarantee their child is getting the best decision. That’s the beauty of it.”
Another challenge is getting more physicians to serve the needs of the patients that come to the hospital. Day says the hospital has seen tremendous growth in both physicians and advanced practice providers.
That growth keeps pediatric patients in Kentucky, he says, instead of them going to other states. But the need for more specialists continues. The national shortage of pediatric specialists combined with increased need presents a challenge the hospital is meeting through more aggressive recruiting and more retention efforts.
The Plan Has a Purpose
“One of the things we’ve asked on surveys is, ‘What is it that keeps you at UK?’ and uniformly it is the people,” he says. “It’s the people you get to work with, the relationships that you have with those individuals, and the family-type atmosphere that we have.”
Still, he says, providing care to children allows him the opportunity to do things he might not be able to do with adults.
“Are there moments that are tearful? Absolutely. But I’ve had the opportunity to be able to take my guitar out and play a little music with a family that was going through a horrible time,” he says. “Those are things that I will never take for granted.”
For him, it’s all part of a larger story, one in which we don’t always know all the parts to. But it’s a story that over time, will all become clearer. His faith leads him to believe that his part in it has a purpose that he’ll learn one day.
“When I was five years old playing in the creeks and hollers and Leslie County, Kentucky, I would never have imagined that I’d be sitting here…but somehow, here I am,” he says.
“When I walk down the ICU, I may have a baby here with congenital heart disease. I may have a teenager here with cancer. I may have a teenager that got in a motor vehicle accident, and most likely, I’ll probably have some other kid that’s overdosed on something. So, there’s this gamut of things that we get to see, and we get to manage…and we get to be a part of helping.”