Expanding a Vermont Program that Enlists Parents of Special-Needs Children to Teach Medical Students
Expanding family-centered care principles in medical education
From 2000 to 2003, Parent to Parent of Vermont, a network of support and information for families whose children have a chronic illness or disability, increased its capacity to serve its clients and expanded its education program for medical students and residents.
Key Results: During the course of the grant, project staff:
- Recruited and trained an additional 39 parents to provide peer support and provided peer matches to 251 families.
- Increased awareness of Parent to Parent of Vermont through outreach activities that included:
- Mailings to pediatric practices.
- Expanding its Web site.
- Publishing a quarterly newsletter.
- Placing informational "bookmarks" in 200 public libraries, 38 bookstores and 40 pediatric practices.
- Held four training sessions for family faculty and added 24 new family faculty.
- Secured funding to establish a Family Faculty Institute and to pay stipends to all family faculty who teach in the medical school.
- Helped to revise the medical school curriculum, in collaboration with the University of Vermont College of Medicine and the Department of Pediatrics, to better integrate ethics, epidemiology and genetics and a family-centered care philosophy across the four years.