Request for Proposals: Pediatric Love

BYUradio is partnering with sociologist Liberty Barnes to create a companion podcast to her upcoming academic work The Children's Hospital (Oxford University Press, 2027). We seek a seasoned podcast production partner to develop and deliver a limited-series audio podcast featuring Dr. Barnes’ research, theory, and interviews about Pediatric Love that appeals to medical drama audiences. 

Basic Format: 6-8 episodes, 40 minutes each. Dr. Barnes narrates her ethnographic observations at a children’s hospital in Oregon, featuring interviews with doctors, patients, families, and other hospital staff, in an immersive audio experience that brings listeners into the children’s hospital. Hoping to secure high-profile cohost or featured participant to raise the profile of the podcast. 

Target Audience: Fans of medical dramas and positive medical social media influencers: The Pitt, Dr. Beach Gem, Dr. Tommy Martin, Dr. Rubin, Jen Hamilton.

Podcast Goal: Educate listeners about why children’s hospitals feel different from other hospitals and other spaces where children gather, like the public school system, because it operates from an orientation toward abundance, justice, and sanctity of life, leading to interconnection that prepares patients, families, and doctors to face the holy and the horrible. Motivate listeners to use these attitudes to inform other systems (prisons, schools, health care more broadly, etc). Podcast success will be measured in impact and engagement, not financial return.

Target Launch: Q2 2027

Scope of Work: Podcast Production Partner will handle all creative and technical aspects of developing and delivering the limited-series audio podcast.

Sample Stories to Feature

• At the scene of a drunk driving accident, a small child is found in a destroyed vehicle, under the bodies of three dead men, one of them his father. He’s in his pajamas, tiny, unconscious, with barely a heartbeat. The EMTs whisk him away to the children’s hospital where he’s fitted with a halo-gravity traction device, a metal ring that encircles his head and is secured to his skull with pins. Vertical rods extend from the halo to a rigid vest, which will immobilize the boy’s upper body until his spinal injuries heal. Then his mother and grandmother wait for the boy to wake. Over the course of weeks, his mother loses her fast-food job, but the social worker at the children’s hospital help her navigate the maze of bureaucratic paperwork to apply for social security survivor benefits and state caregiver compensation. The child’s injuries will require months of rehabilitation, years of medical care, safe housing and nutrition, and daily support from caregivers.

• A teenager dies in a river accident in a rural area far from the children’s hospital. Local medical personnel contact the children’s hospital to consult—because the teenager’s body temperature was in the high 50s. If the cause of death was drowning, there was no hope for the patient. But if the boy had died of hypothermia, there was a chance – albeit miniscule – of survival. The emergency team from the other hospital loaded the boy into an ambulance and traveled more than an hour to UCH, administering CPR for the duration of the transport.  When the boy arrived, still not breathing or alive, he was hooked up to a extracorporeal membrane oxygenation machine that slowly, incrementally, raised his body temperature one fraction of a degree at a time. The next day, nearly twenty-four hours later, the boy’s body temperature was back to normal. Shortly thereafter, the boy’s heart began beating on its own and he opened his eyes. His extremities showed movement. He began to breathe on his own. To everyone’s amazement, the boy made a full recovery with no physical injury or brain damage.

  The following submission guidelines & requirements apply to this Request for Proposal:

• Company Overview and Team Bios
• Portfolio - 2-3 examples of relevant podcast work
• Proposed Approach to the Podcast
• Budget Estimate

• References

  Contact Heather Bigley with questions and pre-submission consultation.

  Submit proposals to [email protected] by June 15, 2026.