Fall 1999 – Focus Groups Y In this Issue: From Our Director New Staff, New Leadership YFocus on Family Summary Vermont Family Voices YFocus on In-home Respite Readers' - Family Story Our Calendar Bottom of page

From Our Director...

I am happy to share with you, through this issue of The Heart of It, a summary of the conversations and responses recorded during the Parent to Parent / Children with Special Health Needs focus groups. We are grateful to Naomi Tannen, a consultant, for facilitating each of these meetings, and to David Baker, a former member of Parent to Parent's Board of Directors and working in the planning division of the Agency of Human Services, and Lynn Reynolds, a Parent to Parent Board member and researcher, for entering and coding the data. Most importantly, we are grateful to the families who took time out of their enormously busy lives to complete the surveys and meet with us. We sought your direction about the services and supports you rely on, and promised that your suggestions would be incorporated into our strategic plan and that we would share your voices with other agencies, programs, organizations and individuals. This catalyst for change reaches well beyond Parent to Parent. We hope you will feel the difference as we implement your suggestions and recommendations. We've already begun!

Here’s a list of what’s been happening:

• As a result of the meetings and surveys, we've focused our attention on the issues of respite, personal care, and in-home nursing care. We are clarifying concerns, meeting with agencies that provide these services, and, in collaboration with other organizations, crafting legislation that will make a difference. See Respite
• Families knowledgeable about our one-to-one support affirmed its value. Those unfamiliar with our network were frustrated because they had only learned about Parent to Parent through the focus group mailings. These families asked us to do a better job of getting the word out, especially to physicians, hospitals, and educators. Over the next year our Family Support Team will travel to areas of Vermont with few Supporting Parents in an effort to expand our peer support network and to meet with potential referral sources to provide information about Parent to Parent.
• A common suggestion from families encouraged family support programs to collaborate, clarify, and coordinate their services in order to provide more comprehensive, community-based supports. We will be meeting with family support organizations to respond to this recommendation.
• Families outside of Chittenden County asked us to consider regionalizing our Partners In Care Conference in order to bring some of the workshops, speakers, and opportunities to meet with families and professionals in their communities. While we consider new possibilities, we have decided to postpone our December Partners In Care Conference but promise you - we'll be back!

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