‘Focus on kids’
FWKCC Breakfast Series spotlights ET Children’s Hospital
The occassion was a FWKCC Breakfast Speaker Series event in Rothchild Catering & Conference Center, 8807 Kingston Pike, Tuesday, Aug. 2.
“We’re the only hospital that focuses on kids,” said featured speaker Matt C. Schaefer, ETCH president/CEO.
“As of 2021, the United States was home to over 6,000 hospitals,” said Julie Blaylock, FWKCC CEO/president, while introducing Schaefer.
However, ETCH was among “only 2 percent of those facilities operating as larger acute-care children’s hospitals that were providing specialized programs,” she added.
“That obligates that very small number of hospitals to provide targeted care for nearly 80 million of the country’s children, which is over 20 percent of our entire population.”
“In a lot of ways, we’re a mission that hopes to never exist,” Schaefer said. “We would love for no one to ever need our services. We’d love for healthy kids to be healthy and never require a children’s hospital, but we know that’s not the world we live in.
“We’ve served 160,000 patients just from Knox County,” he added. “One hundred and sixty times, someone walked through and saw a pediatrician … a specialist … the ER.
“It doesn’t’ matter whether it’s 2 o’clock in the afternoon on a Tuesday or 2 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, mom and dad are going to be so concerned about their most prized possession that they’re going to go to a place that they trust for care, and we’ve had 85 years of being trusted.”
The facility started as Knox County Crippled Children’s Hospital in 1937 during the polio epidemic.
“I stand on the shoulders of giants in terms of what’s been built here,” Schaefer said.
“We’ve had to re-invent ourselves a number of times to be a full-service children’s hospital,” he added.
“That means if your child needs access to pediatric specialized care, there’s almost every pediatric specialist you can imagine, ranging from primary care pediatrics all the way to pediatric neurosurgery here at Children’s Hospital.”
Schaefer said the hospital grew a lot in the 1970s and 1980s, when it started to have more and more pediatric specialists, and expanded outside the hospital — adding 25 locations of care across the region.
“I’m a big advocate of Children’s Hospital,” attendee Stephanie Mader said. “Its an organization of people who really care.”
M. Shannon Littleton, general manager of Lenoir City Utilities Board, related how ETCH helped his family during a crisis.
Shaefer said he joined ETCH because he wanted to do something different with his life and to change lives.
