ChildKind International

Transcription

1 W I N T E R ChildKind International Contact us Kerri Kivolowitz, Program Director, ChildKind International info@childkindinternational.org 333 Longwood Ave., LO-549 Boston, MA Follow us Facebook: Holiday Greetings from ChildKind! With the help of ChildKind s many friend s and colleagues, this has been an extraordinary year in the life of our expanding and vibrant organization and we are so thankful for your continued commitment. We are particularly thankful to our volunteer leadership team (Bonnie Stevens, Gary Walco, Linda Linsalata, Allen Finley, Neil Schechter and Paula Forgeron) for all the countless hours that they have committed to this project. The following are some of the highlights of the past year. Our newest members 2016 Children s Minnesota of Minneapolis & St. Paul Rainbow Babies & Children s Hospital

2 CHILDKIND INTERNATIONAL WINTER 2016 Certification News Over this past year, two new hospitals have been certified as ChildKind Hospitals, Minnesota Children s in Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Rainbow Babies and Children s Hospital in Cleveland. We welcome them to our family. Additionally, five other North American hospitals are presently developing their ChildKind applications, and we hope to add hospitals outside North America in the near future. Bonnie Stevens, who heads our Certification Committee, has done extraordinary work reconfiguring the application package and auditing process. Funding Updates Through the hard work of Linda Linsalata, we were fortunate to receive a generous grant for $150,000 from the United States Cancer Pain Relief Committee. Their generosity allowed us to hire for the first time, a program director, Kerri Kivolowitz. Kerri came to us with extensive experience in nonprofit management and her energy, organizational, and technical skills have had an immediate impact on our productivity. We now have a highly responsive and friendly face to the outside world, and a new computer platform to centralize our organizational activities. Kerri is also working to broaden our presence on social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Linked-In, allowing us to more readily share ChildKind news and updates and to help foster community, collaboration and name recognition for our expanding organization. Our Growing Team of Site Auditors It will be impossible for our existing group of site visitors (Bonnie Stevens, Neil Schechter, Paula Forgeron, Allen Finley, and Gary Walco) to visit all of these new locations (they all actually have day jobs) but the US Cancer Pain Relief grant allows us to train additional site auditors and we pleased that Fiona Campbell, Renee Manworren, Deirdre Logan and Bill Zempsky have been able to join us in observing our most recent site audits. 2

3 CHILDKIND INTERNATIONAL WINTER 2016 ChildKind s Resource Library and Collaboration with Open Pediatrics As many of you are aware, a critical part of the mission of ChildKind is to provide a clearinghouse for up-to-date evidence-informed policies, protocols, and educational materials for the pediatric community. It is our hope that this information can provide modifiable templates for institutions that lack such policies or want to upgrade those that they presently have. Carl von Baeyer has taken on this formidable task and we are so thankful for his diligence. Recently, however, through the generosity of Boston Children s Hospital Department of Anesthesia, Perioperative, and Pain Medicine, we are able to use the resources of the OPENPediatrics Program ( to dramatically upgrade the capabilities of our resource library. OPENPediatrics now has presence in 145 countries and thousands of users and they have generously offered to have the ChildKind Resource Library reside on their server (but still be accessed through our website), which allows for a dramatic increase in our technical capabilities. Carl will continue to lead this initiative but our resource library will hopefully have a much broader audience so that we can provide greater access to current resources for those institutions that desire assistance in developing or enhancing their own. A Warm Welcome to Rainbow Babies & Children s Minnesota! This November, Rainbow Babies and Children s Hospital and Children s Minnesota joined our ChildKind family of hospitals, which now includes: Boston Children s Hospital, Connecticut Children s Medical Center, The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, and Seattle Children s! Thank you to all these leading institutions for their exceptional commitment to the treatment and prevention of pain in children. 3

4 CHILDKIND INTERNATIONAL WINTER 2016 ChildKind and Amazon Smile Kerri has registered ChildKind International with AmazonSmile. Now, at no additional cost to them, friends of ChildKind who use Amazon through smile.amazon.com, can select ChildKind as their preferred charity, and direct a small percentage of their purchases to be donated to ChildKind International. Customers simply go to smile.amazon.com instead of amazon.com, and enter ChildKind International as their charity of choice. AmazonSmile saves the selected charity for future purchases, and Amazon Prime accounts are honored through AmazonSmile. The website for AmazonSmile looks exactly the same as Amazon.com in every way, except for the charity option. A direct link to our organization on AmazonSmile is also available at: Getting the Word Out In the past year, lectures about ChildKind have been presented at many fora around North America as well as other international venues including the World Pain Congress in Japan, the International Pediatric Pain Symposium in Seattle, the International Pediatric Association in Vancouver, Canada, as well as childrens hospitals in Brazil. working on the mechanism to accomplish this. The OPENPediatrics program, which will host our Resource Library, has kindly consented to help us develop a promotional video to explain ChildKind. We are developing a mixed methods research plan to examine the impact of institutional commitment to pain management and ChildKind certification on a variety of variables. Finally, we hope to cultivate additional funding sources and fundraisers to allow our activities to further expand. We are pleased with our progress towards achieving our mission providing children s health facilities with the incentive and technological support to reduce needless pain in the children for whom they provide care. We are so thankful for all of you who have helped us in this initiative and invite others to join us in this good work. Best wishes to all for the holidays and the New Year. We are convinced that this coming year will be equally productive. Here are just a few of the projects we are pursuing: We intend to create a virtual forum where thought leaders in the area of pain management at ChildKind hospitals can meet and share experience and ideas. We are planning a formal launch to solicit hospitals outside of North America to join ChildKind and are 4

5 CHILDKIND INTERNATIONAL WINTER 2016 Happy New Year, from all of us at ChildKind International! We have so much to look forward to in 2017, and thank you for your continuing support and commitment to compassionate pain management in children. Thank you! ChildKind International 333 Longwood Ave., LO-549 Boston, MA Website: Linked In: Amazon Smile: