Care Notebooks

A Care Notebook is a way of keeping everything pertaining to your child's health condition organized and in one place. No more having to dig through stacks of papers before meetings.

Personalize it to suit your needs!

It's portable so you can take it with you to appointments. With a Care Notebook, you to have all the necessary information right at your fingertips.

The bottom line is it allows you to be a better advocate for your child!

With the Care Notebook, you can:

· Track changes in your child's medicines or treatments

· List phone numbers for health care providers and community organizations

· Prepare for appointments

· File information about your child's health history

· Share new information with your child's primary doctor, public health or school nurse, daycare staff, and others caring for your child

To set up your Care Notebook:

Step 1: Gather your existing information: Gather up any health information you already have about your child. This may include reports from recent doctor's visits, immunization records, recent summary of a hospital stay, this year's school plan, test results, or informational pamphlets.

Step 2: Review the Care Notebook: Which of these pages may help you keep track of information about your child's health or care? Choose the pages you like. You can either print copies of any that you think you will use and fill them out by hand, or download a copy and save it to your computer so that you can easily update the pages in the future.

Step 3: Choose what to keep in the Care Notebook: Decide what information you look up most often and what information is needed by others caring for your child. Store other information in a file drawer or box where you can find it if needed.

Step 4: Assemble your Care Notebook: The key is to make it easy for you to find the information you need, quickly and easily. Some ideas in putting your Care Notebook together include using tabbed dividers to create your own sections, pocket dividers to store reports, and/or plastic pages to store business cards and photographs.

Information taken from The Center for Children with Special Needs