Renita Williams Thomas had parented five children and spent years as a pediatric nurse before she understood the impossible choice facing parents of medically fragile children: Keep working or keep your child safe and healthy.
That understanding came with her sixth child—Kai-Li, a baby girl born severely premature that she and her husband adopted. “When I saw her face, I knew she was my child,” Williams Thomas says.
Williams Thomas, Business Report’s Executive of the Year, loved her work, which involved 12-hour night shifts as a pediatric nurse, but it would be impossible to continue without finding day care. Every provider she asked—at least 20 in all—declined, saying they could not meet her medical needs.
“It was an overwhelming, resounding, no,” she says.
“It was a huge problem, right under my nose, that I’d never noticed before,” Williams Thomas recalls. “The trajectory of my life changed in an instant. The moment I realized there was not an adequate option, I remember thinking, this has to be done, and I’ve got to do it. I wanted to create a hybrid between a home health agency and a day care.”
In 2012, she founded In Loving Arms Healthcare for Kids, a pediatric day health center for medically fragile children that integrates skilled nursing, early education and family support.
“We manage breathing tubes, feeding tubes, ventilators, complications of early births,” she says. “We care for those children so that moms can return to work and return to school.”
The Baton Rouge center has expanded twice since opening. Today, it operates in a 7,500-square-foot facility licensed for 70 children; Williams Thomas has capped it at 50 for now to maintain standards. At school age, children transition to school whenever possible and then often return for summer and school break programs. The center has cared for about 1,100 children since 2012. Her next expansion, she says, will be into Mississippi and Texas.
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