Please help with silent auction and event promotion outreach

Over 600 individuals and corporations helped us last year. It was a boom year however and the economic climate has definately chilled. So far we have had some great responses for silent auction requests however we can use more. So if you can provide any item or service, or you know someone else who can, we would love to hear from you!

Favorite items include signed sports memorabilia, restaurant vouchers, tickets to cultural events or locations, health and beauty services, toys and games. The sky is the limit and no item is too small.

We are also looking for food sponsors. If you have a favorite easy to eat on your feet food or a relationship with a chef, distributor or shop we would love them to know about our event!

You can reach us at fundATsashabellafund.com (replace the AT with @) and we will be happy to followup with the person or company directly.

All contributors will be listed on our day of event promotion and the website.

Thanks very much for your consideration!

Calling all performers and event specialists!

We are firming up the entertainment lineup for our October 18, 2009 fundraiser for Sickkids and wish to hear from any skilled kid's performers.

* MUSICIANS

* ARTS & CRAFTS SPECIALISTS

* OTHER PERFORMERS

Please email us at:

fundATsashabellafund.com (replace AT with @)

We offer honorariums up to $125 per person.

The event will be 10am to 3pm at the beautiful new Wychwood Artscape Barns on Christie just south of St Clair.

If you know someone special, please pass on this post for us. Thanks!

CHD Education Day for Families

The first Labatt Family Heart Centre family day will be held Saturday September 12, 2009 and is called Healthy today, healthy tomorrow: An information day for children and families with congenital heart disease at the 525 Bay Marriott close to Sickkids.

"This day aims to provide children and their families with up to date information on congenital heart disease and health related research. Sessions are catered to the learning needs of children and their families 5 years of age and up."

AGENDA Saturday, September 12, 2009

8:00 AM - 8:40 AM Registration and breakfast

8:40 AM - 8:50 AM Welcome and introduction

8:50 AM - 9:10 AM Innovations in heart health

9:15 AM - 10:30 AM Physical activity and exercise

10:30 AM - 11:00 AM Refreshment break

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM Healthy Eating

12:00 PM - 1:00 PM Lunch

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Relationships, independence, self-esteem and having a say in your health

2:00 PM - 2:45 PM Moving towards adult care

2:45 PM - 3:00 PM Refreshment break

3:00 PM - 3:30 PM Sharing lived experiences with congenital heart disease

3:30 PM - 4:15 PM Networking with others

Input was received from 70+ parents sampled during several months of clinic visits. Hopefully future days will include the young child and children who are palliative.

Register online for free

Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering - request for editorial participation for issue on "MOTHERING, BEREAVEMENT, LOSS AND GRIEF"

[This is a post of an emailed request for participation from JARM]

Dear ARM Members and Friends,

The Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering has planned to publish JARM Vol. 12.2 (fall/winter 2010) on the topic of
"MOTHERING, BEREAVEMENT, LOSS AND GRIEF."

We are seeking 3 guest editorial board members: 2 faculty and 1 graduate student for the editorial board of this issue.

Duties include preparing over email the call for papers beginning immediately July 2009 (2-3 hours) and then10-20 hours devoted to reading all article submissions and making decisions re: what should be included journal issue (May/June 2010), as well as a 4 hour meeting in Toronto in June/July 2010 to finalize article selection in conjunction with other ARM Journal Vol 12.2 board members.

Please note ARM is unable to pay travel costs for volunteer board members...but we are happy to send a letter of invitation you can forward along to your university/college when seeking funding. One must be a member of ARM to sit on a guest editorial board: http://www.yorku.ca/arm/armmembership.html

PLEASE EMAIL aoreilly@yorku.ca asap with a short note/bio about yourself and your expertise/work/interest in this area if you would like to be considered for the Journal Advisory Board for Vol 12.2.

PLEASE NOTE: Please only volunteer if you are certain you can assist with all duties listed above.
We've had some issues with recent committees/ have not been able to locate some committee members at the crucial times outlined above
(leaving much of the work to ARM Director and Staff).

Please only volunteer if you can truly commit the time.

Thank you in advance,

Andrea O'Reilly

Association for Research on Mothering (ARM)
Demeter Press
726 Atkinson, York University
4700 Keele Street
Toronto, ON,
Canada, M3J 1P3
416-736-2100 x60366 (fax) 416-736-5766
arm@yorku.ca
www.yorku.ca/arm

An Imaginative Partnership: Parents and the doctors who care for their children - Frank Gavin

Frank Gavin's contribution to the May/June 2009 Paediatrics and Child's Health is a must-read for staff and families. He draws on parent/patient feedback and two decades of hospital and health care involvement to tease out themes that resonate with parents when it comes to staff engagement, identifies core barriers to parent partnership and offers vivid, at times surprising reflections:

One quality I expected this mother or some other parent to identify as essential in a paediatrician was never mentioned: empathy. Instead, what she and others seemed to be hoping for was something best called imagination... a need not for the doctors to be feeling what they were feeling but to comprehend the contours of their lives, at least once, from the inside.

He also includes a parent 'map' with almost 30 circles of care and supports created by the mom of a child with cerebral palsy that dramatically shows the complexity of the family's life:

She created an earlier version to help herself and others get an overview of what she called the elements of her son's care and the people involved in that care. More particularly, she had come to realise and to worry profoundly, given life's uncertainties, that no one else possessed anything close to her knowledge of all those elements that made her son's life the wonderful but difficult life it was and is.

Thanks Frank for this rich and beautiful exploration of staff-parent partnership in hospital and at home. The focus on the mom's map I think is an inspired valuation of work that some parents already do informally. The question "How do staff help parent's and children better navigate?" is a constant refrain in hospitals and yet parent's are often doodling and inking the links in care for themselves. Staff and families could create these maps together as a component of that imagining relationship. Should a parent wish to create a map for themselves to show staff, or work on it jointly, these maps could be a super tool and point of reference for a clinic visit and an excellent accompaniment to family white boards, journals and binders. They could start as hand-drawn sketches and then move to PowerPoint templated files. Maybe one-day a clever developer with a small budget could create a website mapping tool available anywhere and anytime online or on the network. Read the full article here.

happy birthday Sash

Here's sister Eve looking at you Peach.

June 6 was Sasha's birthday, June 20 her death-day and June 21 her sister Mia's birthday. Needless to say, June is one helluva month for our family. Pamela pushed the walk to October so we could take it easy, and it has been a month of playing in the garden, planting, bicycling, wagon rides, dancing, bbques. Mia and Eve know Sasha's name and can recognize her in a picture. I expect anytime Mia will ask where Sasha is. Maybe we will have cake and candles on Sasha's birthday after Mia knows more.

She is very much in our hearts. I have to remind myself she is more than the sum of my questions about her care and our work at Sickkids. She was an incredible girl and I feel blessed for the brief time we were physically together. When I recall exact moments of care I am transported by waves of love and grief to heights and depths not imagined.

A new Patient Safety Centre links Sickkids, Sunnybrook and U of T Faculty of Medicine

University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine has partnered with Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre and the Hospital for Sick Children to create a new University of Toronto Patient Safety Centre that will "foster novel research and education projects aimed at improving patient safety both locally and internationally" and "provide a focus for collaboration across the Toronto Academic Health Science Network including all the affiliated hospitals and all of the health science and related programs at the University." (my emphasis).

This is exciting news because Patient Safety work positively aligns families and staff collaboration efforts. Patient safety is a top level shared focus. Patient Safety research also squarely focuses on the communication problems that account for as much as 60% of sentinel (death and serious injury) events and continuously improved communication is at the heart of family centred interprofessional practise. Patient Safety began as a parent movement advocating new proceedures to learn from and eliminate error and grew with academic research, education, hospital quality and risk management reports and changes to practise, from surgery checklists to hand wash campaigns to involving patients and parents at Rounds and with medications to new thinking on medical error disclosure.

Patient Safety may very well be the communication glue and 'bridge' linking the family-centred bubble around the patient and the interprofessional bubble around the team(s).

Joining Director Dr. Kaveh Shojania as co-lead is Dr. Anne Matlow, Medical Director of Patient Safety and the Director of the Infection Prevention and Control at SickKids Hospital in Toronto.