Helping Achieve the Best Quality of Life for All (QoLA) Patients
At Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, we see the highest acuity patients in California with extraordinarily complex care needs. Sometimes children are hospitalized for a short time, and sometimes we care for them—and their family—for years. Their quality of life is the guiding principle for everything we do.
Our Quality of Life and Pediatric Palliative Care team spans pediatrics, psychology, nursing, pain management, social work, chaplaincy, child life, education, and case management. We partner with the child’s primary care team to meet families where they are and assist in decision-making and developing a plan to make every day the best day possible. This goes beyond the patient’s symptoms, underlying condition, or disease—it addresses the broader continuum of well-being, including the psychological, emotional, spiritual, and cultural needs of each child. Together, we ensure that each child receives the comfort and dignity they deserve.
Our vision for the new division of Quality of Life and Pediatric Palliative Care is to reach every corner of the hospital with proactive, integrated approaches to care—we’d be the first children’s hospital to accomplish this—and establish a model program to be replicated across the world. Help us get there.
Opportunity for Impact
Your support is vital to help families navigate incredibly difficult moments. We want to partner with you to:
Expand our clinical team.
Our goal is to build a robust team, expanding the reach of our program, so it is embedded in all clinical programs across the hospital and into homes, making quality of life a part of every care team conversation. Philanthropy will accelerate the hiring of child life specialists, medical interpreters, social workers, chaplains, home-based care providers, and more, all specializing in palliative care.
Fuel research.
Our palliative care leaders are world-renowned for their research on palliative care, grief and bereavement, and advancing quality of life. We want to hire a research director and team to build upon the momentum of our evidence-based research taking place in areas like psychology, quality improvement, curriculum development, and more so that we can propel the global field of pediatric palliative care forward.
Train the next generation.
We aim to establish an all-new accredited pediatric palliative care fellowship program. Fellows will develop the skills to improve care for critically ill children at Packard Children’s and beyond. Philanthropy will help launch this fellowship and directly support up to three fellows a year in their training—launching future experts in this field. This first fellowship will be for physicians, but we aim to start additional interdisciplinary fellowships for advance practice providers, social workers, psychologists, and chaplains in the future.
Meet Dr. Baker and QoLA Care
In November 2023, Justin Baker, MD, joined Stanford Medicine as the inaugural division chief of Quality of Life and Pediatric Palliative Care. Dr. Baker’s approach focuses on Quality of Life for All (QoLA, pronounced “koala”).
QoLA Pediatric Palliative Care:
• Is appropriate at any stage of serious illness and can be provided alongside diseasedirected treatment.
• Prevents, identifies, and addresses suffering in children with serious illnesses, their families, and the teams that care for them.
• Is an active and holistic approach to caring for patients and families.
• Embraces physical, emotional, psychological, social, spiritual, and cultural elements.
• Includes management of symptoms, provision for respite, and care through death and bereavement.
Dr. Baker and his team will leverage philanthropy to expand the QoLA Program at Packard Children’s and beyond. We are grateful for your help making this vision a reality!
Please Contact:
Our Team
Giving@LPFCH.org