Toolkit Tuesday: Protocol & Therapy Review Worksheet

[00:00:00] Tara Hunkin: This is My Child Will Thrive and I'm your host, Tara Hunkin, nutritional therapy practitioner, certified GAPs practitioner, restorative wellness practitioner, and mother. I'm thrilled to share with you the latest information, tips, resources, and tools to help you on the path to recovery for your child with ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, or learning disabilities.

[00:00:23] My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed, trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey. A quick disclaimer, before we get started.

[00:00:47] My Child Will Thrive is not a substitute for working with a qualified healthcare practitioner. The information provided on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat your child. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before implementing any information or treatments that you have learned about on this podcast. There are many gifted, passionate, and knowledgeable practitioners with hundreds if not thousands of hours of study and clinical experience available to help guide you.

[00:01:17] Part of our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to effectively advocate for your child so that you don't blindly implement each new treatment that comes along. No one knows your child better than you. No one knows your child's history like you do or can better judge what is normal or abnormal for your child? The greatest success in recovery comes from the parent being informed and asking the right questions and making the best decisions for their child in coordination with a team of qualified practitioners in different areas of specialty.

[00:01:50] Today's podcast is sponsored by the Autism, ADHD and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. In order to learn more about summit and to sign up for free, please go to mychildwillthrive.com/summit. Welcome back to the My Child Will Thrive Podcast. I'm Tara Hunkin and I am excited to be back to you today with another episode of Toolkit Tuesday. What is Toolkit Tuesday you might ask? It's where we share some of the best tools in toolkit that I have learned over the years that either help you manage your child's care,

[00:02:31] or actually we're going to be doing some toolkit episodes coming up where there are actual tools that we use in therapies themselves. Today, though, I want to talk to you about one of my favorite tools that's in the free My Child Will Thrive dot com toolkit, and you can find that at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit. And that is the Protocol and Therapy Review otherwise known as the progress tracker.

[00:03:02] And I like to say it adds a little science to the art of managing your child's care. And the reason why I like this tool so much, and I developed it over the after years of working with my own child and then working with other people is that consider it the ultimate decision making tool. And it is a tool that I recommend for everybody to use to help not only track your child's care,

[00:03:29] but really to help you make those decisions. When we get stuck or you feel like you need to start or restart, you're just moving along and you just want to know if what you're doing is working or whether you need to stop doing that and change, or whether you need to continue to do what you're doing because you're seeing progress. it also is the tool that I love to help work with a practitioner so you make sure everybody's on the same page and that we are providing them also with information that they need to help us make decisions as we move forward with our children. So if you are listening to this on a podcast platform, want you to know that you can also watch it where you can actually see what I'm going to share with you and what the tool looks like. It's a one page digital download, you can watch that on our website and mychildwillthrive.com. podcast episodes are there in video format too. You can watch it on our YouTube channel and you can watch it on IGTV on our Instagram feed as well. There are lots of different ways to go about seeing this if you want to stop to look at the video at some point in time.

[00:04:36] But in the meantime, I'm going to describe in detail what is on this one page Protocol and TherapyReview Worksheet. And I say, it's a review worksheet because it's not just a tracker, but it's what we can use to review what we've been doing our children as well when making those decisions. So what it has on the one page tracker or review worksheet,

[00:05:00] it has obviously the basic information you're writing your child's name down. That may seem simple, but of us have more than one child that working with at a time and it makes it a little bit easier to keep track of things that way. You're going to mark down the start date. So what's the date you're starting this new therapy or protocol or whatever it is that you were doing with your child.

[00:05:22] And then the next box is the expected duration. So how long are you going to be doing this? How long do you expect to be doing this? And that's a conversation you can have with your practitioner. It's always good to set those expectations right away so you know what you will need to do in order to make sure that you're getting the best information as to whether or not this particular thing you're doing is going to work for your child.

[00:05:46] Some things have a shorter duration, other things require a longer commitment in order to ensure that they are given the right amount of time to work. The next box is the review date and what I mean by the review date is the date you're going to sit down and review the information you've gathered with yourself or your practitioner or in conjunction with your practitioner.

[00:06:09] So again, when we are doing a new treatment or protocol therapy, we need to have an expectation as to how long before we're going to sit down and evaluate it again. We may be doing it for six months, but the evaluation might be once a month. We may be doing it for three months, but we need to review things every couple of weeks.

[00:06:26] It really depends on what you're doing. So that is why that data is there. The next box just gets us to outline exactly what we are doing. So what is it that you and your practitioner yourself have decided that you're going to do is a therapeutic diet and what are the parameters within that diet? Is there a supplement protocol that you're taking Is there a neuro rehab protocol that you're taking on or your occupational therapist or speech therapist? So that's where, what is it you're doing when you're doing it? How frequently you're doing it? All those little details go in there. And the next section of the worksheet is where we're going to set what our objectives and outcomes are supposed to be and how we're going to measure each of those objectives or outcomes that we're expecting to get.

[00:07:17] So this is critical. This is where we help to close those, first of all, those expectation gaps. It also helps us understand how and what we want to measure to know if we're being successful with this particular treatment or therapy. So again, the worksheet gives you some spaces to do this. You may need to some more lines we allow,
[00:07:42] but three major objectives or outcomes from a particular protocol is probably appropriate. But sometimes there are more. Those measurements, ideally you want them to be an objective measurement, meaning that a test or an assessment of some kind that has more structure to it. So it could be a lab test, it could be even what you're tracking on your food journal or your daily journal, poop and all those of things that's going on.

[00:08:12] But ideally something that you can actually say you can see the results from. There some times will be nothing objective that we can do. All of the interpretation may be subjective and we're going to outline those, too, if that's all we can do to determine whether or not something's working or not. And the last third of the document or that one pager is our observations to date.

[00:08:37] So this is where you're going to jot down things you're observing while you're doing this therapy over time, you may want to even observe. So for each of those outcomes, you might want to note down your starting point for them. So example, if you're hoping to improve their fine motor skills, and you might want to just make sure you'd note down

[00:08:59] where you tested for that before, or a date of what a writing sample that you have from your child or something like that, that will help you understand where your starting point is. And then you can write down all the things you're observing and maybe some jot notes down to other thingsyou can look at it, even if it doesn't all fit on this sheet.

[00:09:20] So once you have all that information, you're going to then be able to sit down at that review date with your practitioner, or if you're doing this by yourself independently. You can sit down that review date and then look at those objective measurements and see where you think your child found success in what you're doing and where you aren't as, you're not sure if it's working.

[00:09:43] But with this information, you are going to be able to make better decisions about whether you're going to stay the course, whether you're going to double down on a particular protocol of therapy if you can be doing more because you see progress, but you would like more if that's possible. if you say, you know what, I don't think this is working.

[00:10:03] It hasn't made any measurable differences and it's taking up a lot of time, energy, financial resources, so it may not be the best use of resources at this particular point in time. And that really is what this comes down to is that we need to be able to make those decisions and allocate the resources that we do have to the things that work the best for our child

[00:10:25] for where they're at right now. I hope this helps you and you can download this tool along with all the other ones that are the free digital My Child Will Thrive at mychildwillthrive.com/toolkit. In there you're going to find more tools like this that are all part of my RAIRE Method system. And you can find things like cheat sheets on mitochondrial dysfunction,

[00:10:53] primitive reflexes, digestive dysfunctions, all those types of things are in there as well for free. I hope this helps you. Always love to hear from you if you find success in this, and if you have enjoyed this podcast, I encourage you to subscribe and review and share with other parents and practitioners like yourselves. Bye for now. So that's a wrap.

[00:11:19] Thanks for joining me this week on My Child Will Thrive. I'm so passionate about giving you the tools and information you need to help your child recover. And as they say, it takes a village. So join us in the My Child Will Thrive village Facebook group, where you can meet like-minded parents and stay up to date on everything we have going on at My Child Will Thrive.

[00:11:38] This is Tara Hunkin and I'll catch you on the next podcast or over at mychildwillthrive.com.