CHKD Facts

About CHKD The Children’s Hospital of Virginia

Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters (CHKD) is Virginia’s only freestanding children’s hospital and the heart of a comprehensive pediatric healthcare system that provides comprehensive medical and surgical care to children. CHKD’s primary service area encompasses southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, a region that is home to approximately 500,000 children under the age of 21.

Our Charitable Mission

• CHKD was established in 1961 as an 88-bed, not-for-profit hospital by The King’s Daughters, a women’s service organization that has worked to improve the health and well-being of local children since the late 1800s. The King’s Daughters still support the hospital today, through fundraising, advocacy, and leadership on our boards.
• The hospital has always upheld the charitable mission of its founders. Each year, Medicaid covers approximately 55 percent of its inpatient days, the highest percentage by far of any acute care hospital in Virginia.
• Because Medicaid does not cover CHKD’s true cost of providing care, the hospital has a large annual shortfall between the costs we incur caring for Medicaid patients and the reimbursements we receive from Medicaid. In fiscal year 2022, that shortfall totaled nearly $33 million. The hospital also provided $2 million in charity care.
• With the help of our generous community, CHKD is able to ease the government’s burden of caring for our region’s most vulnerable children. We subsidize needed pediatric services that no one else in the region offers. We advance general and professional understanding of children’s health, and collaborate with others who share our devotion to children to create a safer, healthier, and more equitable future for all. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2022, CHKD’s total community benefit, minus offsetting revenue, totaled $132 million.

Children's Hospital of The King's Daughters

• Today, CHKD is a 266-bed, freestanding children’s hospital and the heart of an integrated pediatric health care system with nearly 4,000 employees. There are roughly 5,000 admissions to the hospital every year.
• Every inch of our facility and all members of our medical team are devoted exclusively to the comfort of young people. Our patients benefit from the full range of pediatric specialists and support services available only at freestanding children's hospitals.
• In 2020, the hospital completed a new Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, with 60 private rooms and 10 rooms with two beds each, perfect for families with twins. This state-of-the-art design facilitates bonding and family-centered care, while offering the highest-level medical interventions to the region’s most fragile newborns. The NICU has approximately 500 admissions a year.
• CHKD’s Pediatric Intensive Care Unit is the region’s largest and most sophisticated critical care facility for children and adolescents suffering from acute, life-threatening illnesses and injuries. The unit also provides post-operative care after complex surgeries. Child life specialists, social workers, and chaplains supplement the medical care provided. There are approximately 1,500 admissions each year to the PICU.
• CHKD’s Neuroscience Unit provides specialized care for neurology and neurosurgery patients. The unit is a Level 3 epilepsy center, certified to offer the professional expertise and technology required to provide the highest-level medical evaluation and treatment, including extended monitoring for children with complex epilepsy.
• The hospital completed a renovation of its inpatient pediatric Rehabilitation Unit in 2019. The unit is the only one of its kind in Virginia and provides comprehensive care to children and teens who have had a change or loss of functional skills after an illness, surgery, or accident.
• CHKD's also renovated its Technology-dependent Intensive Care Unit in 2019. Designed specifically to accommodate ventilator-dependent patients who need longer inpatient stays, the unit offers many homelike touches and provides age-appropriate activities to optimize each child’s emotional, intellectual, and social development.
• Any child or young adult with cancer or a blood disorder who requires hospitalization is admitted to our Hematology/Oncology Unit. On this unit, pediatric hematologists and oncologists lead a team of specially trained nurses and other medical professionals to care for patients with cancer and blood disorders. Special rooms equipped with HEPA-filtration systems keep immunocompromised patients protected from infection.
• CHKD’s General Care Unit has 32 beds for patients who require medical management and pre- and post-surgical care for a wide range of pediatric diagnoses.
• CHKD is a transplant hospital with the region's only pediatric kidney transplant program since 2005. 
• A specially trained Transport Team of pediatric critical care nurses, registered respiratory therapists, and paramedics is on call 24/7 to bring critically ill children and newborns to CHKD from other area medical facilities. These teams work out of fully-equipped mobile intensive care units. They complete more than 2,000 transports every year, many for newborns who require care in CHKD’s NICU.
• Support services for inpatients include, but are not limited to, child life therapy, chaplaincy, hospital school, medical social work, and pet therapy.
• Children's Pavilion: In response to the region's growing need for pediatric mental health services, CHKD opened Children's Pavilion in 2022. This 14-story, $224 million facility offers 60 private, inpatient psychiatric rooms; outpatient mental health treatment, a partial hospitalization program, and complementary services.

Surgical Services

Outpatient Services