Your tomorrows need to be protected

A fundraising campaign to provide essential medical care protecting against infectious diseases.

Protecting Your Tomorrows

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News and stories

The battle against COVID-19 is transforming every aspect of our lives – the way we manage our workdays, how we educate our children, how we socialize and for those in health care, how we provide essential medical care. Our medical personnel are mentally and physically exhausted from the fight. Yet the struggles are far from finished.

When the pandemic began, we developed a plan to ensure we could provide the highest level of care to patients, in the safest possible environment for our staff. This plan lives up to the Promise we made over a century ago. It helps to protect everyone under our roofs, as well as prevents the spread of COVID-19. We created this plan to do our part, and we are asking you to do yours.

We are working with our generous communities to raise $35 million through the Protecting Your Tomorrows capital campaign. These funds will allow us to have a precise combination of clinical facilities and operations to care for COVID-positive patients, as well as those with other contagious viruses, like flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) which regularly fill our medical center’s beds.

Join our efforts

This fundraising effort is more essential now than ever before. The unpredictability of this virus is evident as the number of those infected rises, falls and rises again. We’re not entirely sure what will come next, but we can prepare for it. We’re asking our friends and families to join us in Protecting Your Tomorrows. Because your tomorrows should once again be like the yesterdays we all hold so dear. And tomorrows like those are worth protecting.

To make a donation, contact Cook Children's Health Foundation at 682-885-4105.

How we're Protecting Your Tomorrows

Prepare

Construct a year-round solutions center with dedicated space for an incident command center.
Increase our overall hospital bed count to meet the growing needs of our communities.

Protect

Build a six-bed infectious diseases critical care unit.
Utilize an existing 20-bed unit as needed to treat patients safely with infectious diseases.

Educate

Create a new space for our internationally accredited simulation lab. This move will allow the lab to accommodate more education opportunities for staff and patient families.

Six-bed infectious diseases critical care unit

This unit will have dedicated entrances and exits for patients, staff and families to help protect the hospital environment. It also will use negative air pressure to reroute the infected air in each room away from other patients and medical staff. Each of the rooms in this unit will have a private bathroom, so the parents will not have to leave the unit and potentially contaminate other areas. The design of this space also will include safety features for staff and caregivers. There will be a decontamination area so health care workers can shower in between patient care before leaving the unit, as well as a space near the unit entrance for donning and doffing PPE.

Solutions center

The construction of a year-round solutions center with a dedicated incident command center will create a technologically advanced office space for our leaders to meet, while also accommodating proper social distancing protocols. This space will provide leaders with access to real-time global health updates and allow for rapid, informed decision-making.

Clinical Learning Center relocation (Finished Oct. 2021)

We relocated the Clinical Learning Center to accommodate the construction of the new infectious disease isolation critical care unit. Last year, we were the first freestanding children's hospital in the world to receive full accreditation through the Society for Simulation in Healthcare, and are excited that this updated space will help us grow the program.

Expanded general medical/surgical unit

This 32-bed unit is replacing and expanding the general medical surgical unit that will be utilized, as-needed, to treat COVID-19 and other infectious diseases unit. This will allow us to meet the growing needs of our communities.

Architectural renderings of campaign projects

News and stories

State of the system news conference

Our experts addressed journalists regarding COVID-19 and children.

What our doctors are seeing right now

An inside look at the record numbers of patients visiting our emergency department and urgent care centers.

Five things to know about the FDA's approval of Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine

Infectious Diseases expert Nicholas Rister, M.D answers questions.

Knowing that Cook Children's is actively working to protect each and every employee, patient, and family in our community reassures my trust in the organization and our Promise!

Dayton Emery, BSN, RN, CPN, CCRN, Intensive Care Unit

I am beyond excited about the new infectious diseases critical care unit! It is humbling to work for a system like Cook Children's that is always looking for the next thing needed to make pediatric health care better. After spending the last 25 years of my career here I must say, however, that I am not at all surprised that this is in the works. This is a system that never stops rising to the occasion.

Mary Suzanne Whitworth, M.D., Medical Director of Infectious Diseases

To make a donation, contact Cook Children's Health Foundation at 682-885-4105.