Packard Foundation donates $100M to children’s hospital

Sierra Clark, foundation board spokesperson and granddaughter of the late Lucile Packard, told the Town Crier that such a large gift to the children’s hospital represents an investment in the community as a whole and in its future.

“I think it’s a statement about maintaining roots and a real investment in the community,” Clark said.

Even with state-of-the-art research and technology at the hospital, Clark said the donation is just as much about ordinary pregnancies and deliveries.

“We have given gifts in the past that are more about cutting-edge clinical research,” she said. “This one is really about the community. It’s about the women, it’s about the kids. We want to make sure that the everyday families are remembered and supported and on par with the very complex cases that might excite people from a medical perspective.”

More than 4,400 babies are born at Packard Children’s Hospital each year, with more than 130,000 babies born since the hospital opened in 1991.

The foundation’s contribution will still fund a number of research-based improvements, including the transformation of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit from primarily open rooms to private rooms where parents can stay with their babies, a design that has recently gained favor among researchers.

“In designing the hospital, Lucile Salter Packard had the then-revolutionary idea of keeping newborns with other children – and mothers with their babies,” said David K. Stevenson, M.D., who works as a neonatologist at the children’s hospital. “That decision catapulted Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford ahead of every other children’s hospital in the country, and this gift could do the same.”

When completed, the renovations will expand the labor and delivery unit’s space by 20% and feature a number of private rooms for both antepartum, delivery and postpartum care.

The project, with a total budget of $800 million, is scheduled for completion in 2028.