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Child & Family in the Health Care System "Issues Bank”

In order to track and retain important issues for future consideration by the Child & Family in the Health Care Working Group, we have established an online "issues bank". The following suggestions have been submitted.

I don’t think I realized how caught up with our son's specific diagnosis we became – we had to step back and remember that our son was also a young boy and a brother to 3 other siblings. For a long time those two sides of his life (a boy with a diagnosis and being a boy) were separate to me. It wasn’t until I was able to figure out how to mesh the two together that I saw what that was doing to the rest of our family. It is my opinion that it is so important to help patients and families to look back at the life they were creating for the whole family. Things change, especially when a child in the family is chronic, or acute. My stress level started to level out once I started to look at all the ways that he was the same as all the other 4 year old kids around him, not always focusing at the differences. I think that a balance is important. We very easily got caught up in our son's diagnosis and what we had to do to try to make him “better” (or more like our other kids). I think it is important for health care professionals to consider that this happens to families. For our good mental health it has been important for us to look at our family inclusively and adapt to help our son to have a full and really meaningful life.