Resources for You

Each month, Family Voices Indiana provides the families we serve with a summary of the month’s hottest items. If you missed us on Facebook, here is the latest!

Awareness:

November 1 celebrated T1Day (Type 1 Diabetes) and kicked off National Diabetes Awareness Month. Learn more here.

Veteran’s Day, November 11. Many military and veteran families struggle to support children with special needs and/or are trying to overcome service-related injuries and trauma. Call us for more resources.

November 17 marked World Prematurity Day. Learn more about preterm birth here.

Get Smart About Antibiotics Week, November 11-17. Learn how to use antibiotics in the most effective way.

November was National Epilepsy Awareness Month. To learn more about epilepsy, which affects more than 2 million people in the United States, please visit the Epilepsy Foundation’s website.

National Adoption Month was also celebrated. Remember, there are many children with special health care needs in America and abroad waiting for their forever, loving home.

 

Family Voices:

Check out our Family Voices Staff Spotlights! This month’s page featured staff members Kerry Bonney, Cristy James, mother-daughter combo Brenda (Family Leadership Specialist) and Angela Darrol, and one sweet kid, Mikayla (daughter of Heather Dane).

Facebook fans liked our many inspirational quotes. Be sure to check out our page for a pick-me-up.

The holiday season presents many opportunities for us reflect on the many blessings our special children bring to our life but can also cause stress as we try to maintain a routine for them. This article highlights “Ten Reasons to Give Thanks for your Child with Special Needs,” while this blog includes “5 Tips to Help Children with Special Needs Feel Comfortable at Your Holiday Party.”

Learning that your child has special needs is often overwhelming. Our staff and fans liked this blog post, “My advice to parents of a newborn with special needs.”

This dad wrote his account of “52 Days in NICU” specifically for all the NICU dads out there. If you’re a father of a child with special needs and want to speak to someone who understands, we encourage you to call. Our Family Leadership Specialist, Brian Replogle, is ready to listen.

 

Training and Learning Opportunities:

Family Voices works to fulfill our mission of empowering families by providing you with educational opportunities and resources. Check our website frequently for learning resources by visiting: http://www.fvindiana.org/training. This month, we shared the following on Facebook.

This resource teaches families how to provide intensive health care at home. Let us know if need additional resources.

We enjoyed collaborating with the ASK staff in order to make both groups’ staff more effective advocates and resources for families of children and youth with special health care needs. Learn more about ASK by visiting their website, www.aboutspecialkids.org.

PACE (Office of Parent and Community Engagement) offers several engagement opportunities for parents and the public, including opportunities to partner with parents around the state, recognize great parent leaders and community members for their commitment to education, and explore IDOE resources and information on key issues affecting our schools today. Learn more here.

One of the items discussed in our transition training is helping young adults with special health care needs begin to take a role in their own healthcare (as much as they are able to). This video gives an overview of tips for talking with your doctor.

 

Newsworthy:

We've created a FB page for our Latino families who prefer information in Spanish and/or would like to connect with other families. Check it out: https://www.facebook.com/VocesDeFamiliaDeIndiana.

 

Requests for Collaboration:

 Family Voices always encourages followers to use their voice to affect positive change to our systems, public and private policies. Here’s how you can use your voice.

Help improve family-centered care by assisting Family Voices with testing a questionnaire on this subject. This questionnaire allows families to evaluate the quality of the family-centered care they receive from their health care providers. It’s very important to be able to measure the quality of family-centered care in a particular situation in order to know how it could possibly be better.
For this review process, we need at least 600 parents and caregivers from around the country to complete the questionnaire, which takes about 15 – 20 minutes. This will help us know which questions work best to measure family-centered care, and what adjustments may be needed. The result will be a shorter, more powerful questionnaire that can be used to measure how effectively family-centered care is being implemented in particular health care situations. Thank you for your help!