For Packard, a Family Legacy Fuels Cutting Edge-Care for Mothers and Babies

Photo credit: David Hodges, DNK Digital

More than three decades ago, Lucile Packard set out to create a hospital to promote the health of mothers, infants and children. Today, the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford, which opened in 1991 and merged with Stanford University Medical Center in 1996, ranks as one of the top 10 children’s hospitals in the U.S.; patients travel from across the country and around the world to seek treatment there. 

Medicine has made tremendous advances in the last 30 years, and to ensure that the hospital keeps up with the latest developments in maternal and infant care, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation just announced a $100 million gift to modernize the hospital’s obstetric and neonatal facilities. 

It’s a big new gift, but just the latest in a long history of support from the Packard family — rooted in the wealth of the Hewlett-Packard co-founder — toward healthcare for mothers, infants and children. The family foundation, now governed in part by the third generation, has given the hospital more than $600 million over the years, making it one of the largest donors to children’s hospitals in America.

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is among the largest philanthropies in the country, with assets of around $9 billion. It’s a top climate change funder, as IP has reported, and supports a range of other environmental causes, including agriculture and ocean conservation. Packard provides funding for health access and reproductive health causes in the U.S. and abroad, including abortion rights. But the family’s commitment to the hospital remains steadfast, rooted in the mission of the family matriarch.

“The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is delighted to help Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford continue to deliver on my grandmother Lucile’s vision,” said Trustee Sierra Clark when the $100 million gift was announced. “She believed that all mothers and children deserve the same excellent care.”

The Packard affiliations can be tricky to untangle; the David and Lucile Packard Foundation made this recent gift to the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children’s Health (LPFCH). LPFCH, which is wholly independent of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, raises funds for the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford and the child health programs at Stanford University School of Medicine. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has been LPFCH’s largest cumulative funder since it was founded over 25 years ago.

LPFCH was created “at the urging of the Packard family, so there would always be a team dedicated to focusing on philanthropy for the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital and the child and maternal health programs at the Stanford School of Medicine,” Cynthia Brandt, the foundation’s CEO and president, said in a recent interview. “We like to say that we’re here to unlock philanthropy to transform health.” 

Funding is particularly important for the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, as it treats patients regardless of their ability to pay. “We are the safety net hospital for San Mateo County,” Brandt said. “We don’t turn patients away, moms or kids. It is a really powerful engine of health equity in our community and beyond.”

A “revolutionary approach”

While most people who know the Packard name probably associate it with David Packard, one of the electrical engineers behind the early tech giant, Lucile had a key role in establishing their legacy. Most people agree that there would be no Packard Children’s Hospital without Lucile Packard. But she also participated in the creation of Hewlett-Packard, which grew from a small electronics shop into a multinational information technology company that is the foundation of the family’s wealth. Lucile met David Packard when they were both students at Stanford. After they married, she helped her husband and William Hewlett set up the shop in a Palo Alto garage in the late 1930s. 

Of the firm’s early days, Lucile Packard once said, “My role was typing the letters, keeping the records and heating up the coffee pot,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Over the years, the Packards would become a pioneering presence in Bay Area philanthropy, donating millions of dollars to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the San Jose Museum of Art, as well as providing the initial and ongoing funding for Packard Children’s Hospital. 

Dr. David Stevenson, a neonatologist at Stanford Children’s Health and a professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine, helped Lucile Packard plan Packard Children’s Hospital, and credits her with its groundbreaking approach. One of the factors that makes the hospital unique is that it placed care for mothers, newborns and children all in one facility. (Labor and delivery facilities at that time were typically located in adult hospitals rather than children’s hospitals, and still are in many places.) Packard Children’s Hospital was and continues to be “the only facility in the Bay Area to offer obstetric, neonatal and developmental medicine services all in one place,” according to the grant announcement.

“In designing the hospital, Lucile Salter Packard had the then-revolutionary idea of keeping newborns with other children — and mothers with their babies,” according to Stevenson. “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.”

The recent $100 million gift will allow the hospital to modernize its facilities to keep up with cutting-edge research on maternal and infant care. Packard Children’s Hospital already delivers 4,400 babies a year and treats mothers and babies with complex conditions that many hospitals aren’t equipped to care for (two-thirds of the mothers treated there are at high risk). 

Packard Children’s cares for some of the highest acuity patients in the country. “This means that we provide the highest level of care to the sickest kids in the country,” said Cynthia Brandt. “We do things that just are not possible at most other children’s hospitals.”

The modernized facilities will allow the hospital to increase the number of babies delivered there by 20%; it will also allow more space for the latest technology and for medical teams necessary to treat high-risk patients. “Modern care for moms and babies has totally changed since this hospital was built 30 years ago,” Brandt said. “Now, for example, it’s very common to have multidisciplinary teams, especially around a high-risk pregnancy or a high-risk infant, and all kinds of technology.”

Family-centered care

The new, enhanced facilities will include 64 private NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) rooms, which limit infection, increase privacy and make it easier for families to participate in their infant’s care. 

“The private rooms will allow a parent or other care provider to stay with their baby as much as their lives allow them to,” Brandt said. “This increases rates of breastfeeding, it lowers rates of parental depression, it helps families learn how to care for this sometimes very fragile baby. So it increases family involvement and care.” 

The private NICU rooms reflect the hospital’s emphasis on family-centered care. “We take that very seriously: When you’re taking care of a child, you’re taking care of a family,” Stevenson said. “Of course, you have to deal with the issues which are relevant to that particular child’s predicament from a health perspective, but you’re also attending to a family and the incredible stress that they are experiencing when they have a child who has to be in the hospital and is critically ill or needs special services.” 

The facility renovations will also include 14 new private labor rooms, nine private antepartum rooms, 51 private postpartum rooms, and three state-of-the-art obstetric operating rooms. Conducting the renovation while continuing routine operations at the hospital will be daunting — Stevenson compares it to doing maintenance on a 747 while it’s in flight — and is expected to be completed by 2028.

Stevenson regrets that Lucile Packard never got to see the finished results of her work; she died of cancer in 1987, four years before the hospital opened. Before she died, she asked Stevenson if he thought their decision to move mothers and babies into the children’s hospital was a good one. “I said yes, and I told her, ‘I promise it will make all the difference in the world.’ And it has,” Stevenson said. “I really feel this new $100 million gift respects the legacy she created.” 

Agents of change

Children’s hospitals operate on a narrow margin, Cynthia Brandt points out, because reimbursements from insurers and government programs, like Medicaid, are lower for children’s care than for adult healthcare. This makes facilities like Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital dependent on philanthropy. Another top-notch Bay Area children’s facility, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, was also fueled by tech philanthropy: Salesforce creator Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, provided over $250 million for the project.

Philanthropic dollars are particularly crucial at children’s hospitals where research and new therapies increase the survival rate and overall health of at-risk infants, as is the case at Packard Children’s Hospital. Today, thanks to such breakthroughs, many infants who not long ago would have died or been disabled, can grow up to live normal lives.

“Philanthropy is what accelerates these really important projects,” Brandt said. “There’s literally no other source than philanthropy and partnerships through philanthropy. I believe that if you want to change the future, children’s health is the top place to make a philanthropic gift or investment. Children’s hospitals, especially those that are connected to academic institutions, are agents of change.”