The scaffolding of my life feels like it has cracked and fallen down,” says Eric Ballew, a former U.S. Air Force pilot and father of three. He’s recounting a road trip two years ago, driving himself, his wife, Renee, and the couple’s son, Tyler, from Las Vegas to Los Angeles — a normal occurrence on a road that carries five million people yearly between Southern Nevada and California. But, unlike most travelers, they were L.A.-bound for Tyler’s final treatment of stage-four melanoma, which he’d been diagnosed with nearly two years prior. For months, this had involved routinely flying across the country to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. At this point, though, treatment entailed regular trips to see a doctor in California — a necessary risk to take, since they had exhausted their other options both in and out of state.
They’d already made the trip three times, uneventfully. This time would be different. Tyler had a seizure (his first ever) while the family was driving outside of Baker, California. Ballew and his wife called 911 and would have been picked up by helicopter had the cloud cover not been as thick as it was that mid-December night. An ambulance arrived 40 minutes later.
“He ends up flatlining in the ambulance,” Ballew says. “The paramedic ends up getting a suction thing. I’m doing chest compressions, and my wife is holding the bag and pumping oxygen into his lungs. I told him how proud I am of him, and as I said that to him, I saw tears stream from both his eyes,” Ballew says. “When we (got to) the emergency room, that was difficult. The nurses said that even though he was not conscious, he could still hear, and so I pulled out my phone and just pulled up pictures of him and talked to him. ... (In the car) he said ‘Why?’ three times and then never talked to us again.”
Tyler passed away just before Christmas, at the age of 13.
“I still go to the cemetery a lot,” Ballew says, “and I sit down with him and continue the conversations that I’d want to have with him.”
The Ballew family’s story highlights what advocates say is a fever-pitch need for a freestanding, comprehensive pediatric hospital in Las Vegas, where children like Tyler could receive treatment in-state. They point to the reality that Las Vegas is the only U.S. metropolitan area with more than two million people to not have a full-service children’s hospital. As a result, 1,500 of the region’s 500,000 children must leave Southern Nevada each year, often multiple times, to receive medical care, leading to disastrous results.
“We are losing Nevada children like Tyler on I-15 while we’re traveling out of Las Vegas to go get treatment,” Ballew says, “And Tyler’s not the only one: I’ve met with other parents that actually lost their daughter coming home from treatment in Los Angeles.”
Beyond the physical danger it poses to medically fragile children, advocates argue, traveling outside Vegas to receive care has ripple effects on the broader well-being of families.
“It’s a financial burden, and it’s a social burden for families,” says Marc Kahn, dean of UNLV’s Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine. “Not only are they dealing with a child with a potentially fatal malignancy, but now they need to leave the state. They need to leave their support structures, they need to leave their families, friends.”
Chelsea Bishop, the president of local advocacy group Act4Kids Nevada, experienced this firsthand when her late daughter, Navy, was diagnosed with neuroblastoma. “(During COVID) I’d leave at 2 a.m. to go to Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to go get a COVID test, so we could go get in-patient (treatment) that same day. (I did this so) she got one more night in her bed and could be home with her family one more night.”
Bishop and Ballew are part of a growing movement of parents, physicians, and local officials who say receiving pediatric treatment in and out of Nevada has become an equity issue.
“It really worries me,” Bishop says, “the disparities here. It’s ridiculous that it’s a privilege to be able to travel out of state to receive the care.”
She recounts having to quit her job so she could travel with Navy. “At the time, we had two kids, and we had to leave one of them behind,” she says. “My husband tried to stay in work so he could keep his job. And that was hard for our family. I think we’re still kind of making amends … making sure that our second-oldest feels loved and cared for, as we were so focused on the oldest one traveling. It’s tough.”
A freestanding children’s hospital, she adds, would allow local kids to remain in familiar environments, with their support systems as they receive care. It would also decrease the fragmentation of the current pediatric care landscape here, enabling families to go to a “one-stop shop” to receive comprehensive services.
In response to growing calls from organizations such as Act4Kids, UNLV’s Lincy Institute commissioned a study this year, published in September by consultant Tripp Umbach, outlining what it would take to build a comprehensive pediatric hospital here. The findings indicated that a freestanding facility would only need 150 beds to complement extant pediatric wings. The projected expense: $1 billion. But, once completed, the new hospital would quickly recoup costs, the report estimated, generating $1.2 billion annually and creating 5,845 jobs.
This fall, Intermountain Health took up the call. The nonprofit, which operates 33 hospitals around the West, including two freestanding pediatric ones in Utah, announced on October 22 that it would be breaking ground on a comprehensive, full-service children’s hospital next year, projected to open in 2030. That $1 billion price tag is expected to be paid by philanthropic donors — the names of which Intermountain Health has yet to confirm. As for location, the company plans to lease a plot of land on the current site of the UNLV Harry Reid Research and Technology Park in southwest Las Vegas. Once finished, a spokesman says, it would include newborn, pediatric, and cardiac intensive care units; oncology departments; and behavioral health services — prioritizing the subspecialty areas which most often require out-of-state travel.
Despite the project only being in its early stages, experts are more optimistic about Intermountain Health’s plans than ever before. Beyond serving local children’s needs and bringing more medical tourism revenue to the region, it would be a first step in helping ameliorate the current provider shortages in Nevada, where there is one pediatrician per 2,531 children — half the ratio of California — and even fewer subspecialists, primarily because the state has no such programs or fellowships.
“There’s a lot of holes in the sub-care specialties in children’s health that would need to be filled,” says David Damore, the executive director of UNLV’s Lincy Institute, “and you would then have this anchor institution, which would be able to attract some of the out-of-state doctors here.”
Until that day comes, Damore remains hopeful, while also recognizing that the hard work is still ahead.
“If we don’t do it now, where are we going to be in 10 years, the next time this conversation comes up and our children’s healthcare outcomes are worse than they are now?” he asks. “This is going to be hard. It’s going to be frustrating. But, at the end of the day you want to look back and say, ‘Yeah, we did that. It was tough, but look at where we are now.’”
Eric Ballew agrees. “How do we help the next kid? How do we help the next Tyler? That’s what I’m focused on now.”
