The largest donation campaign ever has just launched for Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital.
“Primary Promise is a $600 million initiative, which is quite large, with nine initiatives within that,” said Janet DeWolfe, Executive Director for Intermountain Foundation at Primary Children’s Hospital.
The reason this campaign is so vital to the hospital?
“Children's hospitals provide many services that are not reimbursable through insurance,” said DeWolfe.
Children often have serious non-medical needs. They need to play, to talk, and be heard. To make a mysterious and complicated place like the hospital more comfortable. Things like music.
“So expressive therapies is one of them. It's so important to play music - to be engaged in that through the healing process and a child's journey with their illness and disease. We also have child life therapists who help to reduce anxiety during procedure,” said DeWolfe.
They are interventions uniquely necessary for children, that insurance doesn’t subsidize. Along with such things, the Primary Promise campaign aims to expand children’s healthcare services around the Intermountain West.
“We have the largest geographic footprint of any children's hospital in the country…and people travel from Montana, from a lot of rural areas. We serve five states now seven, to be able to get care at Primary Children's,” said DeWolfe.
But getting care just down the road is better than getting care at the end of a road trip, so long as the care is the same.
“Part of what Primary Promise is trying to develop is to be able to keep care as close to home as possible. So that maybe you don't have to travel all the way to the campus to get care. There's another way that we can do that, through working with local hospitals and setting up clinics,” said DeWolfe.
In the season marked by telling a centuries-old story of a young pregnant woman forced to travel far from home, the Primary Children’s Hospital hopes you can make things easier for young families today through supporting the Primary Promise campaign.
