April 2004Vol. 5, No. 3Resources for Working With Allied Professionals
New resources have recently become available to help child welfare professionals offer guidance to pediatricians and judges who interact with foster and adoptive families.
Educating Pediatricians About Adoption
A recent article in Pediatrics discusses how adoptions and adoptive families have changed over the years and offers guidance to pediatricians in the following areas:
- Medical issues, including issues specific to children adopted from another country and to those with special needs
- Developmental understanding of adoption
- Losses in adoption, both for the child and the families involved
- Communicating about adoption with children
- Racial, ethnic, and cultural differences between an adoptive family and child
- Kinship adoption
- Searching for family and cultural ties
- Modeling positive adoption language
For each topic, the article discusses how the child's pediatrician can facilitate communication within the adoptive family or, when necessary, with other professionals.
"Families and Adoption: The Pediatrician's Role in Supporting Communication" appeared in the December 2003 issue of Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, and can be accessed at http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/112/6/1437.full.
Resources for Family Court Judges
Information was recently distributed to 3,000 family court judges to guide them in preventing the loss of health coverage for children and youth who are discharged from foster care. The information packet was put together by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured and was distributed by the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges. Included in the packet were:
- A laminated checklist that judges can use to evaluate risk points and strategies to promote health coverage for children returning home after foster care.
- "Children Discharged from Foster Care: Strategies to Prevent the Loss of Health Coverage at a Critical Transition," an executive summary of the Kaiser Commission's research report that includes relevant statistics on the difficulty of maintaining health insurance for many of these children and youth.
The full text of the research report can be accessed at www.kff.org/medicaid/4095-index.cfm. More information can be obtained from the author, Pat Redmond, at Redmond@cbpp.org. To obtain additional copies of the complete packet, contact Rakesh Singh at RSINGH@kff.org.
Related Item
Judges have an additional new resource in the Judges' Page, a web page for those who hear child welfare cases. Sponsored by the National Court Appointed Special Advocate Association (CASA) and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), the main feature of the Judges' Page is an online newsletter that carries brief articles about recent cases, commentaries, and resources pertinent to child welfare cases. The Judges' Page can be found at www.nationalcasa.org/JudgesPage/index.htm.
