Overview
SKIP is short for Sick Kids [Need] Involved People but it’s long on the kind of assistance that helps thousands of New York’s sickest children each year. SKIP partners with families and acts as a free GPS connecting children to the services they need to grow up at home rather than in hospitals or institutions. A hospital is a great place to cure a child, but it is not a place for a child to live.
Enter SKIP of New York.
Established in 1983, SKIP is the only 501(c)(3) nonprofit of its kind in New York. Each year, SKIP helps over 5,000 medically fragile and developmentally disabled children by linking them to a wide range of services from nursing care, medical equipment and home modifications to educational and recreational programs. With such services in place, children can live at home with their families, enhance the healing process, participate in their schools and communities, realize their full potential – and reduce the cost of their healthcare.
In New York State, the average cost of hospitalization per child is $337,625 as opposed to $69,752 for at-home care, a savings of over 80%. In an average year, SKIP generates a savings of over $50 million in public expense.
For its exceptional service to the New York community, SKIP has received numerous awards, but more importantly, since its launch, it has helped over 25,000 children.
SKIP of New York. Because when it comes to healing a child, there’s no place like home. To see the SKIP story as an Infographic, please scroll down, or to print a PDF, click here.
Our Mission
SKIP of New York’s mission is to help New York’s most chronically ill and developmentally disabled children and young adults access the services they need to live at home instead of in hospitals and institutions.
Our Vision
SKIP of New York envisions a day when all the sick and/or developmentally disabled children in New York who need our help get it. We dream of an even brighter day when the health care delivery system becomes so simple to navigate that SKIP is no longer needed.
Our Values
SKIP of New York began at a kitchen table with one tough set of parents who had been around the bend and back fighting for the services their sick daughter needed to get home from the hospital. They’d stared down the obstacles and won. They then offered what they’d learned to other parents, helping them overcome the hurdles that stood between their own sick children and home. Each case was unique. Each case still is. As SKIP has grown to serve 5,000 children each year, we’ve added new systems and more sophisticated checks, balances and protocols. These changes have been critical to meet the ever-increasing demand for our help. However, the grassroots fight-to-the-finish bite that got that first child home, followed by the second, the third and the thousands more has remained the same. We love our kids and work on their behalf with the same raw intensity that launched SKIP over 30 years ago.
Infographic
