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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.
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