Children in Jeopardy: Rebekah's Story

By Kaley Johnson

Rebekah Jones, who has had four children on Cook Children’s Health Plan, knows too well how big of a difference consistent, quality medical care can make.

Rebekah, who has been a nurse at Cook Children’s for 20 years, is the mother of four children with medical complexities. In 2017, her adopted son, Danny, passed away. After he died, Rebekah decided to foster medically challenged kids and has since adopted three of those children.

As a staff member and mother of patients, Rebekah has seen every aspect of Cook Children’s care. For her, the key to the quality care at Cook Children’s is the relationships that Cook Children’s physicians and providers build with kids over time.

“I am a little biased because I love Cook (Children's) and I think it is the best hospital in the world. And Cook Children’s is our home,” she said. “Part of it is just building that relationship, having doctors that trust you, listen to you, that you can call and say, ‘Hey, like something's not right,’ and you know they would just listen to you and believe you.”

Those relationships are not easily replicated. Rebekah worries if Cook Children’s Health Plan loses essential state funding, her children will have to start all over with new physicians, providers and therapists. She has some experience with having to coordinate with a new medical facility; in 2013 she had to transfer some of Danny’s care to another hospital to be put on the list for a heart transplant. The providers there did not know her or Danny, and in a way, it felt like starting over. Anytime you move medical care, she said, you face the headache of paperwork and trying to find new providers and schedule with all of them. Even the testing and data in a patients’ medical file might need to be repeated at the new medical facility.

For Rebekah’s three children, the relationships built at Cook Children’s under Cook Children’s Health Plan are essential to their quality of life. Because of the Texas Health and Human Services Commission plans to deny Cook Children’s that funding, Rebekah and her kids are in a sort of medical care limbo, wondering what will happen next.