Every kid deserves a childhood
We’re dedicated to improving the lives of our patients who live with complex conditions, disabilities or chronic illness.
La Rabida is a place unlike any other. We understand the needs of families with children dealing with the most serious or complicated of conditions. With teams of the best healthcare providers in Chicago, we give continuous, comprehensive care, education and support, helping families face their unique obstacles head on.
Why La Rabida?
We offer gold-standard care to every child, regardless of a family’s financial circumstance.
At La Rabida Children’s Hospital, our patients aren’t like any other — and neither are we. The children we serve live with complex medical conditions, disabilities, abuse or trauma. At La Rabida, we’re in it for the long haul, and we’ve got Chicago’s most talented providers — pediatricians, nurses, physical, occupational, speech and developmental therapists — on our side.
We have more than 100 years of experience treating children and helping them reach their fullest potential. Each year, we help more than 9,000 children, serving each one with empathy, compassion and the highest quality of care.
We offer an integrated approach to healthcare, caring for the patient while also supporting the family. Children with complex medical conditions often need specific skills from caregivers. Proper training of parents to care for a child at home is one of our keys to success. We make sure parents feel confident and secure bringing their child home.
Between our outpatient and inpatient services, we are able to cover a range of disciplines beyond standard medical care: behavioral therapies, case management, social work, nutrition and rehabilitation services.
Children don’t choose their circumstances, and we never let those circumstances affect the care children receive. We treat patients regardless of financial circumstances (more than 90% of our patients are insured through Medicaid), and every patient is given the same level of care with no differentiating factors determining what, when, how or where care is given.
Your child is the center of your world — and the center of ours.
At La Rabida Children’s Hospital, our mission is simple: we’re dedicated to maintaining and improving the quality of life for each of our patients with complex conditions, disabilities, and chronic illness. The path to completing this mission, however, is often complicated. Our patients regularly require extensive care coordination or assistance in managing lifelong conditions. Fortunately, we’ve got the best team around.
We’ve assembled a care staff of the best, most highly experienced physicians and providers in Chicago. Through our relationships with University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital, Lurie Children’s Hospital and others, we ensure our patients have the gold-standard of healthcare.
Each child and family in our care is assigned a case manager or care coordinator to oversee treatment and provide 24/7 support. Illnesses don’t work 9-to-5, so neither do we. We pride ourselves on being your partner and guide through treatment, day or night, so that children at our centers can return home as soon as medically possible.
We say it a lot, but we firmly believe that every child deserves care, regardless of a family’s ability to pay. The only thing a kid should worry about is being a kid.
La Rabida Children’s Hospital has been providing quality care since 1896. Granted, “quality” is a relative term — back then we were treating conditions like “diarrheal disease” and rheumatic fever. Fortunately, science has progressed and we’ve stayed at the cutting edge of technology (just take a look at our state-of-the-art campus).
But back in the late 1800s, Chicago was preparing for the World’s Fair Columbian Exposition and in 1893, the government of Spain constructed its exhibition hall on Lake Michigan at Jackson Harbor. The hall was a replica of the La Rabida Monastery in Andalucía, Spain, the site where Columbus embarked on his oceanic voyage. The name comes from the building the monastery replaced: an Arabic watchtower (ribats were small Arabic fortifications in Northern Africa and Spain). After the exposition, Spain gifted the city the building for use as a fresh air sanitarium for sick children.
Early on, La Rabida served mostly children suffering from the ailments of slum squalor and improper food handling — children often acquired illnesses from milk or other perishables that weren’t cooled and stored correctly. As those problems eventually eased with more advancements, the hospital turned its focus to society’s new foe: rheumatic fever, which was claiming the lives of children in the 1930s-1950s. La Rabida gained international attention for its research that led to the eradication of the disease.
By the 1960s, La Rabida had made a formal commitment to treat chronic childhood illness. Today, we employ leaders in healthcare to provide treatments for diabetes, cerebral palsy, Down’s syndrome, sickle cell, developmental disabilities and much more. La Rabida is proud to serve as a model for other healthcare institutions across the United States and around the globe
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