Large swaths of Colorado are licensed childcare deserts.

When I moved to the Western Slope, there was no care.

No availability for my daughter, no matter how much I was willing to pay, we couldn't even find a spot.

We're facing these closures.

These disruptions all over the state and all over the country, which are throwing families into chaos.

It just felt like there was no right answer.

You can't get into a daycare.

The nanny.

We'll just turns.

There were times when I had gaps in childcare and would just have to leave my surgery on that day.

When you become a mother, your priority is your children, but you also still have a priority of a career that you are very passionate about.

Their conflicting.

You have to put your kids on a wait list.

The day you find out you're pregnant or somebody decides to stay home.

So you can have that fight.

I'm a family nurse practitioner in general surgery and obesity medicine.

I am the only one who does obesity medicine.

So if patients aren't able to see me, then they do have to be rescheduled.

Pick out your shoes.

Yeah.

Oh.

What happened?

She was looking for her attention.

And for some patients, they've arranged childcare.

They're traveling from 2 or 3 hours away.

The number of times I thought through, like, do I need to back down my hours?

Do I need to take a pause on my career.

And what?

Your face.

There were several times where we had like half days with this person and in half days with another person, and some of those actually, like last minute would quit on us too.

It was so much work.

I mean, you're texting between patients and you're stressed while you're talking to them not knowing about tomorrow.

My first day back from maternity leave, my baby was having a hard time taking the bottle.

Even though we had practiced it and so she hadn't eaten all day long.

And that was very stressful for me.

My mental capacity did feel a little bit torn.

I got a call from the surgeon I worked with on the weekend while I was hanging out with my family, saying that something had happened related to a surgery on that day.

I remember thinking, I have to look at every single order that I put in and what I did during that time when I knew that I was stressed about my child.

And everything was exactly how it should be.

I had put in, every order correctly.

But that moment, that thought of whether I have the capacity to juggle all these things, that was very stressful.

In health care.

We already face a lot of burnout.

And then when you have high emotional output in your career and then also as a mother, it can feel like a lot.

I'm the director of rehab services for Community Hospital.

You know, I am tasked with trying to make sure that we can get patients in as quickly as possible.

And that all revolves around how many schedules are open.

There's a lot of focus on caregiver burnout.

That's a big challenge in healthcare right now.

I think there's less focus on the impact of child care involved in that burnout.

There's always a lot of movement.

We average about 5000 visits a month in the outpatient world, and with a significant amount of my staff having young kids.

So here's your bladder.

We can see how it's darker.

It was extremely challenging from a management standpoint to make that work.

If they are having to think about how safe their child is, it's hard to do your job all day long.

When that is a huge focus, at the end of the day, you're kind of at the whim of what your town with the valley provides.

Child care was the reason that we're losing really good candidates.

I was hearing.

The challenge of being a working parent.

Employees who were driving an hour each way for childcare.

I saw employees, mainly women, stepping away from careers that they had invested years and years and years in.

I care so much about it because it was a challenge for me as a mom, and I feel like if you're in a position to make a change, you should.

How are you doing today?

It's just fine.

Okay.

Child care very much feels like that readiness response of how are we taking care of employees and their families so they can, in turn, take care of the community?

How have you been feeling since the last time you saw us?

Fantastic looking and exhausting.

All possibilities.

The only option left was to build something on site.

I was able to write a grant to the state of Colorado.

We received $800,000.

So that initial seed funding allowed us to then hire an architect.

We kept taking the next step forward.

We had plans.

It started out about a 200 zero square foot facility.

And, you know, then it became, well, how are we going to build it?

At that point is when we went to the board and we said, we have plans.

How are we going to get capital for this?

Our employees gave to this.

The strategy was to fully fund Adventure Academy.

We did.

From groundbreaking to opening.

It was about a 5,000,002 year process.

Welcome to school.

Seeing children, you know, getting dropped off by their parents and their parents, able to turn around and walk across the street and go to work.

That was the hope.

That was what we had wanted to happen.

Baby.

You're playing wow.

Our children at Community Hospital or are out in the backyard of community hospital and being taken care of and loved on and educated while our employees are here taking care of patients.

Adventure Got Me was a major part of why we moved out here.

Having that predictable child care really affects not only the immediate family unit, but also then my ability to show up for patients who didn't sleep the night before because they're scared of their procedure having today.

And then if I cancel that, it's just it ripples out like a butterfly effect.

But.

I had a blockage in what they call the anterior descending artery, which is what we call a whale maker.

They come into the heart.

They placed stents.

Doctor Glover is the only one in the valley that can do that.

The day he did a procedure on me, he had managing a car issue and managing getting kids to the child care center.

To have him be able to come in and do that was remarkable, frankly.

After I got done with chemo, I had surgery, which was a double mastectomy with reconstruction.

I have friends that have gone to a different hospital here, and because they don't have a surgeon at that hospital that can perform that surgery, this wasn't an option for them.

All right.

130/82 today.

Oh.

Thank you.

Better.

I'll go grab the doctor.

Thank you.

Doctor Henderson.

It helps you feel whole again and makes you feel like it's like a woman again.

From what cancer takes for meal.

So I'm eternally grateful for her.

If I didn't have a reliable daycare, there's no way I could do the surgery that I needed to do that I could focus for that ten hours to get her the result that she now has.

I can't be worrying about my daughter when I'm doing complicated surgeries.

I have to be focused on my patient.

Yeah, these blocks are fun.

Childcare can fill a lot of gaps.

I see a camera.

And relieve a lot of parents concerns with where their children are, who their children are with.

Are they learning?

And when we remove those concerns, then that parents can then go focus on their job and their work.

Understanding all of the ways in which childcare actually is making something like a hospital run is really important.

You need there to be a strong childcare system, and then we just have not made that visible.

It's absolutely fragile.

On a child care policy expert, on the author of two books on the subject.

I'm also a father myself.

Is doing work around educational equity, and I started to realize that while schools and teachers are vitally important, there's all of these other factors that leads to opportunity, many of which start at birth.

A lack of childcare is actually a cause of poverty in Colorado and around the country.

It can literally be the thing that trips families into poverty and into homelessness.

A parent who this is too many shifts because they're in an unstable childcare arrangement.

They get fired, their unable to make rent, and then they're out in the streets.

And this is this happens.

This happens in Colorado.

This happens across the country.

While the situation.

Is dire.

The solution isn't rocket science.

It's the same reason schools work, the same reason fire departments work, the same reason libraries work.

The only way those places work, the only way that any other country in this entire world has been able to make child care work is through investments of public funding.

I do have trepidation about relying too much on employers to provide child care services.

And if you think lose your job, lose your health care is a bad enough equation, try to lose your job.

Lose your childcare.

Community hospital should be commended and applauded for trying to step up.

And they're doing something real for the employees, and that is having real impacts.

And I think we need to properly place interventions like that as short term selves while we're fighting for a publicly funded system, and we desperately need employers to be advocating for that system.

Providing onsite childcare is a piece of the puzzle.

How else can we keep our our talented employees and not just at community hospital, but across the community, right.

We had been part of local coalitions and conversations about what are we doing in our community to address this childcare shortage.

Different employers, different groups in town were really trying to look at those solutions.

And for us.

I then chose to just kind of say, what can we do specifically at Community Hospital Adventure Academy?

It's about a 5050 split of children who are our employees and children who are out in the community.

We take care of each other.

We take care of our patients.

We take care of our community, and that's who we are.

Can you see it?

We literally just got into Adventure Academy 2 or 3 weeks ago.

Even in that time, I have felt such relief.

Our children know who their caregivers are.

It's light and refreshing environment.

White lightning streaks across the skies.

I duck my head and close my eyes, just knowing there, right there.

And I can go visit them.

I can change the schedule and it won't be me.

Piecing together a million texts and schedules and half days here and there is such a relief.

When you reassure employees that Adventure Academy is an option.

You can kind of see the anxiety escape them.

Now.

They know that their children are safe and they can do their job, and they can focus on the things that really matter, which is patient care.

Having stable child care is what forged the society to run efficiently.

I mean, everybody that runs in a society needs to have that stability.

Otherwise it just doesn't function appropriately.

Wanting to pursue a career or needing to pursue a career is not a failure on your part.

We have a failure of systems.

Do I want to be an amazing employee or do I want to be an amazing mom?

You're okay.

Can you?

We should be able to say we can figure that out.

When we can't provide the education and the growth and development that our children need.

That's our future.

To learn more about Colorado's childcare challenges and potential solutions, visit Childcare Works ceo.com.