Care your Notebook

The Care Notebook is a tool that you can use to organize information about your child’s chronic health condition. It has many pages that can be filled out to be used as a reference about your child’s health and treatments. The laptop  can then be taken with you to share with doctors, other health care professionals, or school or child care personnel.

Uses for the Care Notebook include:

  • Listing phone numbers for health care providers and community organizations
  • Tracking changes in your child’s medicines or treatments
  • Prepare for appointments
  • Share new information with your child’s primary doctor, public health or school nurse, daycare staff, and others caring for your child
  • File information about your child’s health history

To set up your Care Notebook:

  • Step 1: Gather your existing information: Gather up any health information you already have about your child. This may include reports from recent doctor’s visits, immunization records, recent summary of a hospital stay, this year’s school plan, test results, or informational pamphlets.
  • Step 2: Review the Care Notebook: Which of these pages may help you keep track of information about your child’s health or care? Choose the pages you like. You can either print copies of any that you think you will use and fill them out by hand, or download a copy and save it to your computer so that you can easily update the pages in the future.
  • Step 3: Choose what to keep in the Care Notebook: Decide what information you look up most often and what information is needed by others caring for your child. Store other information in a file drawer or box where you can find it if needed.
  • Step 4: Assemble your Care Notebook: The key is to make it easy for you to find the information you need, quickly and easily. Some ideas in putting your Care Notebook together include using tabbed dividers to create your own sections, pocket dividers to store reports, and/or plastic pages to store business cards and photographs.