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Organizing your child's medical information.In the beginning, our medical files were organized by the family doctor's secretary, as the family doctor was the only person who was sent the results of consultations and tests. Reid's file at Sick Kids hospital was 2 feet thick after several days in the intensive care ward, and that documentation stayed at the hospital, and was later put on microfilm. The doctors and nurses considered that medical documentation belonged to the doctors and not to the patients. They had cute little jargon initialisms like FLK (funny looking kid), Most of a doctor's documentation time is spent using abbreviations to take a record which can be used legally, so it is painstaking work. Verify the Information. If you see a serious error, inform the writer.Reading the documentation which is the result of medical consultations from a specialist to a family doctor and confirming that it is correct is a important job for parents. The parents live with the child on a daily basis. Once they are over the shock of initial diagnosis, the parents acquire specific information about their child's problems and become quite literate at medical documentation, they certainly know enough to check for errors. If you do not know what a word means, look it up in a medical dictionary.
Initially we never had copies of testing. I found a way around this by having the results sent to my friend who is a psychologist, and she would pass the copy along to me. However it should not be necessary for parents to have an intermediary for documentation. The parents have the right to see any documentation. You can control this problem by not going back to specialists who do not include you in the loop. Paper records grow exponentiallyReid's files are now about 1 foot of filing space in my filing drawer. I use hanging files and tabs to indicate:
a Useful Drug ChartWhen I get a prescription from the pharmacy it has lots of warnings about the drugs. What with sick people in the house I designed a weekly drug chart which you can probably copy from this page, and make your own by multiple pastings.
I put the first letter of the drug on the chart at
the time it is to be taken, and X it by hand. If I forget, I can write a letter
C at whenever I got around to taking the drug. Beginning a family medical history
This is an idea of what to put in a list for a
medical history. Once you have set up a table in your word processor, it is
fairly simple to add new rows to contain new information.
It is easier to organize your files and records at the beginning, but usually hard to see the need. Last summer I decided to rewrite my medical history so I could just hand someone a piece of paper which I know is accurate rather than relying on the foggy mind which has given birth four times etc, or trying to hear when my ears are not working. It was quite a job trying to remember events in the past which were quite meaningful at the time, but I persisted and managed to get it all on four pages....then we had a virus which wiped out that whole hard drive. So back it up better than I did. It is a good idea not to store personal information in your computer or to make use of any web site which offers to provide storage for this information. Another Form to List Important Documents Impact of Physical or Mental Illness on Daily Activities
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