Champion for the Endangered
"What are you going to do to help keep our young men from becoming extinct?"
That's the challenge from painter/musician David Haygood as he discusses his motivation behind the work to the left: Endangered. I like to think that my poetic ministry is part of the preservation effort, as well as my work with young people at my "normal" job. However, each adult has to answer that question for himself or herself: "If there is anything I can do to help preserve young lives, am I doing it?"
For some people, like my dear colleague Tiesha Johnson, RN, the question seems to answer itself in many of the tasks she performs on a daily basis. Tiesha is tenacious in her advocacy of better safety measures for at-risk children. Her efforts include:
- Pediatric Planet, a website designed to help parents (and other health professionals) get fast information on a wide variety of child-health issues.
- Lupine Creative Consulting, her own company, a consortium of health professionals commited to qualitative research, aiming to identify and rectify disparities in the health care industry.
- SAFE-T-KID, another of her many pet projects that I can comprehend on a distant lay level, but won't attempt to describe. Tiesha is much better qualified to do that.
- Last, but not least, Tiesha's own blog, which often serves as a source of information and discussion about child health issues, and most particularly, the danger of physical restraints and efforts that should be utilized to minimize those dangers.
Yours truly knows a little about restraints because my job requires that I sometimes initiate them against (no other term fits) children. I hate restraints and I think they're dangerous. Tiesha reports that the children also hate restraints (No shit?!) and that they think restraints are dangerous, too.
Yet, there are apparently some (nurses, no less!) who balk at the duty of simply checking a child's vital signs after what is often a violent encounter with 500 or 600 pounds of aggressive adult intervention. Wow. Maybe they need to ask themselves:
"What (am I) doing to help keep our young men (and young women) from becoming extinct?"
posted by JahStorm @ 2:19 AM
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