March 5, 2004 - National Social Work
Month
First presentation was by Tina Ford, Program
Coordinator at National Kidney Foundation.
Tina reminded us that March is
National Kidney Month. She discussed upcoming events,
including:
Ø A Patient Support Group will be sponsored by NKF and the
Kickoff meeting will be held at 6:00 P.M. on the Legacy Campus.
Ø Kidney Kamp, August 13th through 15th. Brochure for Kidney Kamp was
distributed. Camp will be held at
Canby Grove Conference Center. The
camp is a weekend opportunity for families of children on kidney dialysis and is
free through donations and grants.
Ø People Like Us Live held May 14th in Salem at the
Salem Inn; and then three more scheduled this year: May 23rd, August
29th, and October 10th. This is an educational program for
people with kidney disease and their family or friends. Regina Eckels will be speaking at the
one next weekend.
Ø The Kidney Walk will be held in Portland on July
18th, 2004 and is a fund-raiser. Each walker pays a fee of $125.00 for
registered Adults and 410.00 for children under 12. The dialysis unit that gets the most $$
in pledges will receive a grand prize.
Other prizes include sweatshirts, tee shirts, hats, stadium blankets,
rolling duffle bags, and CD Player and case.
Ø The Cadillac Invitational Golf Tournament will be held
Friday, September 24th.
Ø The national 2004 U.S. Transplant Games will be held July
27th to August 1, 2004 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN. Athletes who have had a transplant for
at least 6 months may try out for one of the teams. Contact Tina for more information or: http://www.transplantgames.org/.
Tina also provided us with a copy of the NKF-ORWA Newsletter
with a calendar of upcoming events.
A reminder of new policy at NKF was that all Patient Grant
deposits will be held until the Log and photocopy of the Check Register is
received. She reminded us that we
may fax those in and mail in the back-up documents (patient requests and
receipts). The deadline is the
10th of the month, but the faxed documents should be in by the
5th.
Don Prebus asked Tina to find out about re-starting the
annual registered patient roster from NKF.
The next hour and ½ were devoted to his presentation of “Professional
Networking via the Internet” a Discussion Forum of the Archive website. Don’s has been working tirelessly on the
site to assist other Nephrology Social Workers in accessing resources helpful to
their work. His presentation
was included as an attachment on the e-mail about this meeting and if you have
not read it or were not at the meeting, I would strongly recommend that you do
so. It is potentially very helpful
in searching out any number of important resources and information. Don would very much like to see
Nephrology Social Workers become more than just “consumers of resources, but
also contributors” through the Internet.
Check it out! Don will be
presenting this material at the national CNSW conference held in Chicago in
April.
The third section of the meeting was presentation of two
cases, one by Jan Rutschman from Salem and the other by Regina Eckels from
Portland.
The first case was regarding ethical and logistical problems
of a patient who has been “blackballed” from dialysis in a convenient
location.
The second case was regarding a mentally ill patient who
wants to change locations because he has paranoid delusion regarding people
thinking about him and knowing too much.
The fact that his perceptions are only partially paranoid and at least
partly true recognition of some staff attitudes toward him and toward his
disability. Ideas, suggestions and
potential solutions were brainstormed.
I found this discussion as helpful as the other two sessions.
This draft submitted
by:
Katherine Howard-Cooper, MSSW,
LCSW
Gambro
Healthcare
Roseburg/Mercy
#8004
2599 NW Edenbower
Blvd.
Roseburg, Oregon
97470-6220
541-677-7357,
office
541-677-7362, fax
line