Keep all of your child’s medical records, prescription print offs and miscellaneous information from doctor appointments in a folder or binder. Carry it with you anytime you take your child for a well check or you have an appointment with a different doctor than normal. It will help you give the most accurate information to the doctors and save you from a lot of paper clutter induced headaches at home!
When we were foster parents back in Arkansas, each foster child had a medical passport. Initially it was a single sheet with basic information provided by their parents regarding general health and allergies, tucked into a folder along with the contact info for the caseworker. The longer the kids were in care, the more information those folders would hold. As a new to that child parent, those folders were very valuable and crucial to providing the best care for the children placed with us.
Upon our discharge from the hospital after little Turkey’s birth, I had a slight stack of papers. The stack grew after his first well check at one week, his first sick visit at one month, and 2nd well check at 2 months. By the time he was 6 months old and had his eye surgery, I could hardly keep all his medical history straight but it was imperative that I could give accurate statistics for his care. I was overwhelmed with papers when it dawned on me that he didn’t have a folder.
Over the course of his short 4 and a half years, little Turkey has had:
- 1 major eye surgery
- 1 Ear Nose & Throat specialist visit
- 1 allergy back scratch test
- 1 visit to a gastroenterologist
- 2 x-rays
- 2 visits to nutritionists
- 3 visits to a endocrinologist
- 8 blood tests
- 8 eye exams under anesthesia
- 11 well checks
- 14 eye doctor office visits
- And no less than 20 sick appointments
Yes, that’s a lot of info to keep up with and be able to answer questions about anytime there is a new doctor to visit.* Particularly when your child has appointments with doctors that aren’t in the same office/system as your PCP you’ll need the medical history that led up to the specialist visit. I love having the info all in one place (providing I remember to add the appropriate papers) and there have been many times I was able to open the folder and give accurate information that I couldn’t have remembered off the top of my head.
If you’d like to get the most accurate and detailed records for your child, simply call your doctors office and request the records. Some offices will mail them to you in paper form while others will mail them to you on a disc. These records will also have the correct dosage for ibuprofen and acetaminophen based on your child’s weight. That’s if you don’t already have the dosage marked on the container that holds those meds of course! (It’s also interesting to see the doctor’s notes on some of these forms too!) You can have your pharmacist print off a record of all prescriptions filled for your child to date and file that instead of all the misc forms for those. This record is quite valuable when you have a long string of repeated sick visits and see at a glance which prescriptions seem to work and which ones don’t.
Do you have a system for keeping up with your child’s medical records and information?
If you don’t, do you think this could work for you?
*Our portion of his medical care to date equals nearly 2 years of mortgage payments on our first home.
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