Northwest Specialty Hospital has created an emergency day camp for children of employees to lift the burden of finding child care and keep the kiddos close to their parents.

As schools throughout the area announced closures following the coronavirus outbreak, hospital staffers quickly converted an empty clinic on the Northwest Specialty campus into the day camp, which serves kids in kindergarten through seventh grade. The camp opened March 16.

“Our owners, the providers that own us, recognized that there was a need for our staff and they wanted to provide that security for our staff members to have their children on our campus and being looked after,” Rasmussen said. “Panhandle Health helped us get our license. We got that within a day; they came out and inspected the facility.”

The camp is being overseen by Northwest Specialty’s special projects coordinator Pam Thompson, who supervised Kootenai Health’s day care for 28 years and now works at Northwest Specialty part time, and Ann Wilkey, who has a master’s in elementary education, teaches Bible school and taught for eight years in the Coeur d’Alene School District. Both have current child care licenses