TRAC-PG website launches

Two years in the works, TRACPG.ca was launched today with a content management software to allow the Team for Research with Adolescents and Children in Palliation and Grief to build content for TRAC-PG itself along with children, families, clinicians, volunteers, researchers, policy makers and advocates. Resources include Events Calendar, News Updates, Links, Key Reports & Documents, Education & Workshops, Literature Reviews and a Literature Database. Additional pieces will be phased in for email signup to HTML e-newsletter (replacing PDF attachments), Photo Gallery and member login with Comment. The team can add rotating photos on a per section basis, create text banners on 'sticky notes' on each section, tag or label stories for a tag cloud navigation and expand a Google map of the TRAC-PG network in Canada. Discussions in the fall of 2006 initially we also hoped to include a private login where staff, children in palliation and families in grief could communicate privately. After Sickkids IT department confirmed that Sickkids would be joining Carepages shortly and that a whole new website content system was in the works, we removed the patient-family-staff communication. By the fall of 2007, the work of architecting and designing the website began in earnest with the aim of an end of summer launch. And here it is, a little trimmer and a little later than the best laid plans but ready to help and celebrate palliative children and their families and remember (via one of the big home page images) Dr. Beverley Antle who was a strong force for Canadian family-centred research until her death in 2006 in the prime of her life due to a car accident, just a few months after Sasha died. Several big thank you's are in order: to the extremely talented and dedicated Gabriela Abrudan for designing and programming this elegant and highly functional site and for her patience with a very long project of the heart; to Laura Beaune who coordinates TRAC-PG research from Sickkids Palliative and Bereavement Care Service for somehow finding time to do all the visioning, discussion, feedback and status calls in the ONE very busy day a week she has at Sickkids - Laura's involvement in the site while dedicated to research supporting children and their families makes me confident the webite will have a positive impact; to Jodi Hamelin and Ashley Teschner for helping us finalize functionality and do most of the content population as part of their work with Palliative at Sickkids; and to my brother Kevin Blumberg for covering my time away from our joint work responsibilities.