Client: Duke University Medical Center
Project: Kick-off speech for capital campaign to build Children's Hospital.

"The Need is Now: Funding a Children's Hospital at Duke"

This is an emergency.

Duke University Medical Center serves 37,000 children a year. 6,000 of these children are hospitalized as inpatients. The remaining 31,000 receive complex care as ambulatory outpatients. Children here receive organ transplants, bone marrow transplants, chemotherapy, blood treatments, pain management and a host of other services. We have the only pediatric AIDS clinic in the region, the largest diabetes clinic, sickle cell clinic cystic fibrosis clinic. More than half the children seen at Duke are on Medicaid or have no insurance at all. We have grown above capacity by 250 percent, seeing 120 children per day in a facility designed for 30 patients a day.

Children treated as outpatients are seen in the sub-basement of Duke South. Small and cramped, the clinic is hopelessly outdated and hidden in a maze of corridors. But that's just the clinic. Ancillary services are located two tenths of a mile away in Duke North. Parents themselves come to tears trying to negotiate their way through it. And while many of the services are dedicated to children, the physical space is not. Pediatric patients, who are often terrified of their illness and the hospital to begin with, regularly see adults with tubes and hardware jutting out of their bodies, and hear them moaning in pain.

The fact is, we are not doing a good job of treating these children. We scramble to compensate for the physical inadequacies of the facilities, but our efforts can't fix the problem. It's time to stop "making do" and allow these children to come back to health in an environment that is cost-effective and conducive to healing.

The proposed Duke University Children's Health Center is exactly what the doctor ordered...