THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, September 16, 1996 TAG: 9609140003
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 48 lines
The Norfolk City Union of The King's Daughters is marking its centenary at a time of tumultuous change in the ways in which medical services are delivered and paid for.
This is an appropriate moment to honor the all-volunteer, all-female organization's awe-inspiring contribution to the well-being of several generations of children and their families living primarily in Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina.
The Norfolk City Union encompasses 1,500 volunteers distributed among 67 King's Daughters Circles scattered from Gloucester to Virginia Beach. All members are dedicated to promoting the health and safety of children and raising about $1 million a year for Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters in Norfolk through their chain of thrift shops and their Holly Homes Tour, Holly Ball and Walk for Children.
A million dollars is a pile of money, but far from enough to sustain today's Children's Hospital, with its annual operating budget of nearly $100 million.
But that gleaming, highly sophisticated 186-bed institution - the only free-standing children's hospital in Virginia - exists because a well-off circle of Norfolk women in the late 1800s began a visiting-nurse ministry to poor families.
There was no Children's Hospital in Roads until 1961. That one opened at all was because the King's Daughters Circles in the 1950s persuaded a skeptical business and professional community that the region sorely needed an acute-care hospital devoted solely to meeting the medical needs of children.
For more than half a century, King's Daughters Circles had underwritten visiting-nurse, health-education and immunization and other sickness-prevention programs focused on children and mothers and, in 1914, a clinic in downtown Norfolk.
That clinic, where physician volunteers volunteer their services, was a big step forward for The King's Daughters. The hospital established in 1961 was a much bigger step - and the vastly larger and well-equipped hospital at the busy Norfolk Area Medical Center far bigger still.
Today's Children's Hospital counted 118,910 outpatient visits and 6,743 patients in the fiscal year that ended June 30. The first King's Daughters Circles could never have imagined so much activity, so much healing. But thriving, prestigious Children's Hospital is a monument to their caring, their ministry - and to all The King's Daughters who followed. by CNB