New London — After two days of oxygen and intravenous antibiotic treatments, 7-year-old Taleigh Hatfield had begun breathing normally and coughing less. The pneumonia that had constricted her lungs was ebbing.

“She’ll have to stay on antibiotics for a couple more days,” Dr. Swati Chokshi told the girl’s mother and father, Tiffany Hatfield and Isaiah Prue of Groton, who took turns staying on spare bed reserved for parents in each of the seven pediatric inpatient rooms at Lawrence + Memorial Hospital. “But as long as her oxygen levels stay up, she can go home this afternoon.”

Hearing no signs of labored breathing when she listened to Taleigh’s lungs through a stethoscope, Chokski asked the little girl how she felt.

“No ouches anywhere?” she asked.

“I’m just tired,” Taleigh replied, clutching a stuffed animal given to her by hospital staff. Hospitalized on Dec. 2, she smiled broadly when she heard she'd probably be going home.

The cherub-faced girl was one of 30 young patients to stay in the revitalized seven-bed pediatric inpatient unit on the fifth floor of L+M since it opened Oct. 19 after a three-year dormancy following a period of reckoning and rebuilding.

In March 2011, L+M signed a consent agreement with the state Department of Public Health to take a series of actions in response to health department inspections that uncovered several violations. The most serious related to an April 2010 case in which an 11-year-old girl with a ruptured appendix died there.

“The trust is back,” said Dr. Fred Santoro, an East Lyme pediatrician who is chairman of L+M’s pediatrics department. “This is a good thing for the community. I expect we’ll continue to see growth, as other communities in the area start using the service.”

With the only pediatric inpatient unit in New London and Windham counties, L+M is now enabling local families of children with acute asthma episodes, severe croup, viral meningitis, high fevers and other conditions needing hospitalization to keep their children closer to home. While the service was dormant, families were forced to travel to Yale-New Haven Hospital, Connecticut Children’s Medical Center in Hartford or Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence if their children needed to be hospitalized.

“For the parents,” said L+M pediatrician Dr. Daniela Hochreiter, “having to go to New Haven or Hartford can really present transportation struggles, job struggles and other problems if they’ve got other kids at home.”

Hochreiter, along with Chokski, Dr. Seun Adekanye and Dr. Katie Magnuson make up the team of pediatric hospitalists — hospital-based physicians — recruited by L+M and Yale-New Haven to provide care in the revived unit. The two hospitals, which are working toward an affiliation, completed the first phase of rebuilding L+M’s pediatric department in 2012, when they partnered on a new pediatric emergency department at L+M. Now, all but the most severely ill children taken to L+M’s emergency department who need to be hospitalized stay there, rather than being transferred to another hospital.

“We actually went to CCMC (Connecticut Children’s Medical Center) first, and we were not happy because they tried to discharge her with a fever of 102.7,” said Daniela Spera of Salem, whose 9-year-old daughter, Ariana, was receiving treatment for pneumonia at L+M earlier this month. “So we came here. She’d been sick for 12 days and was getting worse. She’s been in the hospital for three days now, and they have been wonderful here. They’re on top of everything. I like the fact that there are pediatricians right here. I would definitely recommend them.”

The chance to help shape a pediatric program from the ground up was one of the reasons the four pediatric hospitalists, all recent medical school graduates in their 30s, agreed to leave their posts in different parts of the country for L+M. The four have been at L+M since the summer, providing care to infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care and Labor and Delivery units, along with creating the pediatric unit.

“You’re actually involved in building this,” said Adekanye, whose last post was at Children’s Hospital of Michigan in Detroit. “That’s what attracted us. And, this is good for the community.”

One of the signature aspects of the program they’ve helped create, said Magnuson, is its “family-centered” approach that keeps parents involved and informed about every aspect of their child’s care, with the doctors sharing on-the-spot rundowns on exams, test results and what’s ahead.

“Kids are not little adults,” Magnuson said. “Medical care is different for kids, because you’re not just treating the kids, you’re treating the family.”

Last week, she and the other three pediatric hospitalists gathered with the region’s pediatricians for a meet-and-greet at Filomena’s Restaurant in Waterford. The event, said Santoro, was organized as a chance for private-practice doctors to meet their hospital-based colleagues face to face, even though they’ve already made a good impression.

“We’ve been really happy since they came with the good feedback they’re giving us about our patients,” Santoro said. “They’ve really reached out to the community physicians.”

During her daughter's hospital stay the beginning of this month, Tiffany Hatfield was pleased to hear Chokshi had talked to her daughter’s pediatrician at the Naval Submarine Medical Research Lab about Taleigh's condition.

“She was so sick for so long, and it was impossible for us to get an appointment there (at the sub base clinic), so we ended up bringing her to Pequot,” Hatfield said, referring to Pequot Health Center, L+M’s satellite emergency department in Groton.

She recalled that a few years ago she took her younger child to L+M’s emergency department and had a “horrible experience.”

“But this time it was completely different,” she said. “They’ve been really, really good to her.”

j.benson@theday.com

Twitter: @BensonJudy