Residents of Southeast Virginia and Northeast North Carolina have come to count on the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters to provide vital, top-notch medical care and treatment for children, regardless of their families’ ability to pay for that care.

CHKD is the resource of choice for doctors who want their pediatric patients to get the highest level of care available, to have access to the latest technologies and to get the best opportunities for positive outcomes. Whether providing the highest level of neonatal intensive care available in the region, treating children with cancer or providing child-appropriate approaches to surgery, CHKD has proved itself indispensible to the health care community in Southeast Virginia.

But the hospital’s commitment to provide that pediatric medical care regardless of a family’s ability to pay also makes the community indispensible to CHKD. Support from a wide range of businesses and community organizations is necessary to help the hospital meet its annual budgets and daily needs.

In fact, one such organization, the nonprofit Norfolk City Union of the King’s Daughters, founded the hospital in 1961. During the 51 years since CHKD’s inception, the need for community support has never waned, and community groups have pitched in to raise money for equipment and supplies for essential services and programs and for technology that might not otherwise be available to the hospital and whose absence would result in a diminished level of care for CHKD’s young patients.

The benevolence of organizations like the Walmart on North Main Street in Suffolk help ensure CHKD’s ability to carry out the King’s Daughter’s mission of promoting “superior pediatric wellness.”

Employees and customers at the downtown-area location raised more than $83,000 for CHKD during a special campaign this spring. It was part of a nationwide fundraising campaign for children’s hospitals around the nation. CHKD received about a million dollars from Walmart stores in the area.

As a gesture of gratitude for the fundraising efforts, CHKD doctors and staff showed a few Walmart employees the new 3-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging scanner their money helped buy. The visitors even got to see the machine in action, as an 11-year-old patient had her foot scanned following a running injury. The new instrument is more powerful than the old one that’s still in use at CHKD, and it will help trim the wait time for procedures such as the one the little girl experienced in Tuesday’s demonstration.

CHKD is one of the marvelous things about Hampton Roads, one of the things for which we should all be thankful. Another is the benevolence of the people from the North Main Street Walmart, who helped raise the level of care the children’s hospital provides.