Research

This week in PR Publications, we are taking on our first full assignment from beginning to end. We were first instructed to choose an organization and design a business card for it. I chose St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Through my sorority, I have become very passionate about the research and work that St. Jude does.

St. Jude is a children’s research hospital. That means that the treatments and care used and invented at St. Jude goes to help treat pediatric cancer globally. Since the hospital opened over 50 years ago, the overall childhood cancer survival rate has gone from 20% to more than 80%. Their research is changing the entire medical field tremendously.

The thing that really sets St. Jude apart for me is the fact that no family ever receives a bill from St. Jude. Each day it takes $2 million to run the hospital and 75% of the budgeted costs of St. Jude are covered by public contributions. This is why I am so passionate about the money that can be raised to save children’s lives each and every day.

Since St. Jude is a children’s cancer hospital, they compete with many other hospitals nationwide. When I say compete, I basically mean that they are competing for donations. No children’s hospital is bad. They are all amazing and do amazing things for sick and injured children. That’s where things get a little different. I would say that St. Jude’s main competitor would be the Children’s Miracle Network through the Children’s Hospital Foundation. This, however, is a collection of around 170 hospitals across the country that are run through CMN and CHF.

The biggest value of St. Jude is that they will not stop until no child dies from cancer. The founder, Danny Thomas, believed that “no child should die in the dawn of life,” and St. Jude works each day to find cures and save lives, while also making sure patients never receive a bill for their stay.

This is just a scratch in the surface of St. Jude but I could go on and on about the work they do as the world leader in understanding, treating, and defeating childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases.