Children’s serious illnesses have a profound impact on their families and on the health care professionals who serve them, regardless of the child’s outcome — recovery, remission, chronic illness or death. The prospect of a child’s death is so uncomfortable that our society has long avoided the subject. Consequently, pediatric palliative care and perinatal palliative care have been slow to develop as a field, remains largely unreimbursed by insurers and is otherwise difficult to fund.

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Though most pediatric specialties focus exclusively on the child’s medical condition, pediatric palliative care recognizes that everyone in the family is affected when one member is ill. Pediatric palliative care addresses the needs of the child and extended family, aiming to prevent and alleviate suffering.

Philanthropy is needed to fund and sustain the critical components of this program including:

• Staffing the pediatric palliative care program: 100% of the salaries of our perinatal palliative care chaplain, palliative Child Life specialist and palliative care fellows are funded through philanthropy
• Expanding pediatric palliative care services to the outpatient and in-home settings to ensure families have the resources needed to stay out of the hospital
• Providing palliative care education and training for pediatric residents, fellows, chaplains and medical students to grow the field of palliative medicine
• Providing bereavement materials for loved ones, including memory boxes, photography and other bereavement supports when a family is experiencing a loss
• Long-term patient family support, such as meals, parking and peer-to-peer parent programing