Brades Place

Brades’ Place is a nonprofit organization that provides unique medical care designed specifically for children living with serious, life-long medical diagnoses and their families. Because these severe diagnoses affect all aspects of the patient’s health and their family, we provide whole person and family medical care 24/7, in their home and community.

We do this through patient and family-centered medical care, a connection to their medical team at all times of day and night, multi-modality medical focus, coordination of their existing medical team and services, parent support services, sibling support services, and care provided in their home, where they need it most.

Our outcomes include:
1. By providing specialized and individualized medical care, we will increase the comfort and function of our patients.
2. By working with their existing medical team with support and coordination, we will meet or reduce the child's presently unmet medical needs, resolving their health disparity.
3. By reducing caregiver stress and burden, we will increase parent health and wellness as we reduce the effects of caring for a seriously ill child on parent health.
4. By attending to sibling needs and resiliency through sibling support, we will increase sibling resiliency and increase their emotional wellbeing to minimize the effects of living with 24/7 stress and sibling priority.
5. We will increase social supports and support systems in the lives of our families.
6. By offering educational opportunities to families and communities, we will increase knowledge about how illnesses happen, specific diseases, and how to live well with pediatric serious illnesses.

Children who are born with or develop lifelong illnesses are subject to greater healthcare needs than their peers, and often lack sufficient support to provide for those needs. Barriers to care are often economic, social, geographical, or some combination thereof.

Brades' Place works to identify patients with unmet medical needs and remove or minimize the barriers that keep them from accessing the medical care they need. We do this, and will continue to do this, by providing our services with as little financial burden as possible (implementation of patient grants, foundations, sliding-scale fees, etc), by providing care in the home and utilizing telehealth (improving accessibility), and by providing holistic, supportive services to patients and their families that increase overall health and wellness and decrease the need for more acute medical interventions.

We also recognize that true healthcare equality must happen on a micro and macro level. We are presently working to form a coalition of pediatric palliative care providers in our geographical region, and have regular meetings with our health department to problem solve the need for greater support for children with lifelong illnesses. We have laid the groundwork for legislative action to increase the available resources to these children and their families, and will continue to advocate for these patients in their greater communities.

Our organization's capabilities are rich with diversity and outstanding leadership from our Board of Directors. We have a business plan which outlines our stages of growth and prioritizes our core services. We are committed to keeping lean as an organization so that over 95% of our donations continue to go to direct services.

We are also committed to slow family and patient growth to ensure that the families we serve receive all the services they need during this growth phase.

We have strong support from the community at large, as demonstrated by existing statewide and national partnerships that are formed and we prioritize strengthening.

Beginning in 2017 as a nonprofit and created our founding board of directors. Beginning in 2018, we provide bi-annual community and family events, which have nearly doubled each year in attendance, having over 200 attendees at our 2021 Family Event. In 2019 we graduated our family nurse practitioner with an emphasis on medical care for children with disabilities. In 2020 we added a mobile office and started in-home palliative care services. 2021 welcomed the beginning of parent supportive services and events as well as siblings services and events. We were also able to begin offering supportive breaks away from caregiving for the families in 2021 with in-home respite for all family members.

2022 will bring greater patient census and refinement of our in-home palliative care program on all levels and partnerships nationwide with collaboration to advance the mission of pediatric palliative care. Brades' Place has worked with legislators and state human service and health directors to better meet the needs of these children and their families outside of just Brades' Place. We intend to form a Pediatric Palliative Care Coalition in Utah to stand independently to ensure the needs of Utah's seriously ill children.

Before 2025 we will build a facility to house these needs and provide out of home respite as well.