Consultant’s study highlights Southern Nevada’s need for children’s hospital

About 4,000 children leave Southern Nevada for health care each year with their families racking up thousands of dollars in medical bills, travel fees and lost work wages, said Paul Umbach, founder and president of Tripp Umbach, a Pennsylvania-based economic consulting firm.

Though this only represents about 1% of the population of children in the region, Southern Nevada is the largest metropolitan area in the country without a stand-alone children’s hospital to address pediatric medical needs.

“We’re the only community of our size in the country without a stand-alone children’s hospital, and that’s not surprising because when you think about it, Las Vegas got to be 2 million, 3 million – (and) I guess someday, 4 million people — a lot faster than other places,” Umbach said during a presentation Wednesday at UNLV’s Greenspun College of Urban Affairs.

“It’s immeasurable what pediatric health means to the economy; and what it means to quality of life; and what it means to the real essence of what a community is over time, so it’s hard to put a number on that, and (a stand-alone children’s hospital) will stimulate the local economy,” he said.

The Lincy Institute, the public policy think tank at UNLV, on Wednesday sponsored a discussion centered on a report from Tripp Umbach analyzing the feasibility of establishing a primary children’s hospital in Southern Nevada. Tripp Umbach has completed over 200 independent studies, including for 25 children’s hospitals, and regularly conducts research in Southern Nevada with the Lincy Institute.

The study, commissioned in January by the Lincy Institute and the Nevada Health and Bioscience Corp., found that Southern Nevada needed an independent children’s hospital, which could close gaps in the region’s pediatric continuum of care and bolster the local economy.

Having this facility would not only grow the economy, but improve children’s health, reduce the need for families to seek care elsewhere and attract patients from the rural areas of neighboring states such as California, Arizona and Utah, the study found.

Southern Nevada has been classified as a medically underserved region with significant shortages of health care professionals, including in specialties like pediatrics, with only 59.5 pediatricians per 100,000 children, according to the Tripp Umbach report. Nevada only has 267 pediatricians to serve 640,000 children under the age of 18, “severely” limiting Nevadans’ access to pediatric care and “negatively affecting health outcomes,” the report said.

Even though Nevada ranks last in clinical care for children, according to the 2023 Health of Women and Children’s report, “there’s a great deal of great care that’s going on” in places like the University Medical Center, Sunrise Children’s Hospital and Children’s Heart Center Nevada, Paul Umbach said.

Because of these existing medical centers, a primary children’s hospital theoretically wouldn’t need to be expansive. According to the Tripp Umbach report, a highly specialized children’s hospital with 150 beds that is developed through a regional partnership is “the most feasible and financially viable option for Southern Nevada.”

A place like this would cost about $1 billion and take up to five years to plan and build, the report states.

But the project would generate an economic impact of $2.1 billion, support 11,575 jobs and produce $58.2 million in state and local tax revenue over a five-year development and construction period, the study suggested.

When fully operational, an independent children’s hospital would generate an economic impact of around $1.2 billion annually by 2030 with 5,845 jobs created and $2 billion by 2040 — bringing an estimated 7,679 jobs.

Even with these expected economic benefits, there are challenges in getting some people to see the value in expanding the local health care economy, said Tina Quigley, president and CEO of the Las Vegas Global Economic Alliance.

She explained that many people look at economic development simply as adding more jobs to a region, and bringing in “new spigots” of money, typically coming from industries like manufacturing and tourism. It’s harder to explain how health care can become one of those spigots, she said.

Quigley also believes Southern Nevada, which has long been known for its tourism economy, has “kind of a self-esteem issue” when it comes to the possibility of Las Vegas becoming a thriving research, development and health care environment. The region must get over that, and it’s a conversation that she said was actively occurring within the economic alliance.

“We know that by building that (health care) industry versus the others, we build a strong enough community foundation that then we can attract even more high-wage, high-skill-type jobs,” Quigley said, recalling a story from a recent economic alliance board meeting where members almost unanimously chose to focus on building the local health economy despite it being “the hardest for (them) to move toward.”

There are a few issues that need to initially be addressed, according to the panel. Combating the physician’s shortage that has plagued the state is a big one, said Andria Peterson, chair of the department of bioethics, humanism and policy at Roseman University.

Bringing together Southern Nevada’s “fragmented” health care system — where everything from technology to appropriate specialists are separated — presents another challenge for the state, added Annette Logan-Parker, founder and chief advocacy and innovation officer of Cure 4 the Kids Foundation, which operates the only outpatient childhood cancer treatment center in Nevada.

Despite these reservations, there’s hope that a stand-alone children’s hospital could remedy some of Nevada’s most pressing pediatric health issues, the women agreed.

So, what are the next steps?

According to the Tripp Umbach report, creating a “broad-based coalition” with representation from local hospitals and physicians, medical schools, pediatric providers and advocacy groups would be the next move.

Such a coalition could identify the best site for the independent children’s hospital; help create and expand pediatric residency and fellowship programs in Southern Nevada; develop a policy plan outlining the scope of services the facility would provide; and form recommendations for ongoing reform of Medicaid physician reimbursements to help retain medical experts.

Building an implementation plan would be next, to guide the planning and construction of the stand-alone children’s hospital on or before 2030. And last, establishing an independent, nonprofit organization to oversee the hospital’s development, opening and ongoing operations.

“Bringing this children’s hospital, we’re going to achieve more because there’s so much connection that’s already been there — maybe because of the lack of one place, everyone has filled in what they could — but now bringing it together and coalescing into one kind of ecosystem together, a system of pediatric care,” Umbach said. “We can win, and I think there’s a lot of fight in this room.”

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