Hospital Group Refreshes Advocacy Push

The Children’s Hospital Association has launched a new advocacy campaign with a more direct message designed to cut through the noise around healthcare funding in Washington.

“Put Kids First  (opens in a new tab),” launched earlier this month by CHA, is built around messaging around funding inequalities for children. In the past year, the Trump administration has frozen grant money earmarked for children’s health and attempted to pull funding to the American Academy of Pediatrics  (opens in a new tab). In response, the campaign leans into data points about access to federal programs like Medicaid that serve children.

“We doubled down on what it means to be a macro-level voice for children’s hospitals across the country,” said CHA Chief Public Affairs and Brand Officer Leah Evangelista. “We’re consistently working to have children’s healthcare priorities be part of every policy conversation.”

To that end, the “Put Kids First” campaign is more targeted and blunter than previous campaigns, designed to catch the attention of policymakers in the Washington, D.C., area. Evangelista said that’s partially in response to the current policy environment.

“We need to figure out how to make sure our voice is loud, and we have to be a little more direct in our tone,” she said. “So we’re leaning into data. Fifty percent of children receive their insurance via Medicaid or the CHIP program, and we wanted to give that macro-level picture to D.C. decisionmakers.”

Like a lot of advocacy campaigns, CHA’s integrates storytelling alongside data points, though “Put Kids First” stresses not just children but the impact of funding decisions on the doctors, researchers, and other members of the workforce serving them. Evangelista said that in-persona advocacy still has to drive home the human impact of the associations’ members work.

“It brings an additive value to those conversations,” she said. “One of the really difficult aspects of talking about children’s hospitals, because it is a really specialized type of care, is that very often decision makers, whether or not they sit in the administration or they sit on Capitol Hill, haven’t experienced being at a children’s hospital themselves, unless they were a child who was treated in the children’s hospital or they had their own child who has got care there.”

Whether the campaign will meet its stated goal of shifting focus to children’s health isn’t yet certain. But Evanglista said that the focus on a message that highlights the disproportionate attention children’s healthcare has received should better cut through the noise.

“Healthcare is a very crowded field with lots of diverse needs, and kids are typically an afterthought,” she said. “So for us, [the metric] is, are we raising the awareness of having Hill offices and administration reaching out to us to say, ‘Hey, is X policy going to affect kids? Or how can we help make sure that kids are receiving the care they need?’ So we’re very much focused on the awareness and engagement side of this campaign.”