Hi, Our last topic in this course is preparing for emergencies. Start, preparation through education is less costly than learning through tragedy. No matter how careful or safety conscious you are emergencies will happen. We do not have control. That's why it's called emergency. We do not often have control over emergencies. But if we have a plan, and we know what we're going to do, and we practice this plan. The results can be more positive. This plan must be known, and practiced by all staff at the facility. This advanced planning, and practice leads to sound decisions in a crisis. Some examples of possible injuries that might happen when caring for children are a lost or missing child, suspected maltreatment or abuse while on the premises. This is talking about maybe by a staff member or volunteer or a visitor in the center. Injuries requiring medical care, dental care, or emergency treatment, any allergic reaction, mental health emergencies, the presence of a threatening individual on your facility grounds. If there's nobody comes to pick up the child, and you can't get a hold of anyone on the pickup list or on the emergency contact list, a disease outbreak, environmental or weather emergency, and a lock-down or a shelter in place. In each of these cases, it's a good idea to have some written plan in case something happens so the staff members know what they should do. Preparing for these emergencies. Staff members, all staff members, all people that have contact with that child, should know, and understand the policies, and procedures. I keep saying all staff members because if you have a kitchen worker, if you have a maintenance worker, if you have a cleaner, any of those might be present when an emergency happens, and they should be aware of your policies, and procedures. It's not always just the teachers in the classroom or the immediate caregivers for the children that might be present. Make sure that emergency supplies are available. Emergency supplies could include a fire extinguisher. They could be the backpack that you take outside that might have your blankets, and your emergency supply of water. If you're not able to come back into your facility in a short amount of time. Make sure those are available and ready to use at all times. This also could include parent contact information, and contact information of emergency services in the area. Make sure that first aid supplies are stacked and available. First aid kit should be in every room where there are children. Because if an emergency happens and a child is hurt, and there's no first aid kit in that room and you have to go searching for one that takes valuable time. Keep emergency information for the children and the staff up to date. That includes the contact information, the phone numbers for people that you need to call for emergencies. But it's a good idea to ask parents periodically are this still the people that you want on your emergency contact list? I live in an area that is very near to a military base. People are coming and going. Quite often. A person's emergency contact people on their list might change depending upon if people are deployed or if people have to move. Asking the families if the information is still current on their pickup and their emergency contact list is a really good idea. Staff should be aware of what their responsibilities are in case of emergency. There should be delegated responsibilities to staff members in the classroom so they know what they need to do to keep the children safe. Make sure your staff is trained in pediatric first aid and CPR. This is going to differ, maybe state-by-state and what your regulations say. You might need all of your staff members to be trained. You might only need a certain percentage of your staff members to be trained. Look at your regulations, and see what they say. But it's not a bad idea to try include this in your training for all staff members. Make sure your fire extinguishers are inspected yearly. Make sure that they're easily accessible, and make sure that your staff members know how to use them. That's the tricky part. If you've never used a fire extinguisher before, in an emergency situation, you are already anxious, you're already maybe scared, and picking up a fire extinguisher that you've never touched before might be not the best situation. Making sure that you have talked about how to use a fire extinguisher with your staff members is a really good idea. Practicing drills. This probably will depend upon your state regulations, also, in how often you have to practice a fire drill, same place drill, and or a lock down drill in your facility. Look that up in your regulations, see how often they have to be practiced, and make sure that you're documenting when you do practice them. Keep documentation and make it available. Your emergency contact, pickup list, anything like that. If you have a situation where you need to leave your facility, make sure that you have that information with you when you leave, and it's available, you can just grab it and go. The documentation for maybe incident reports or injury reports should be kept in a child's file in case you ever have to go back and refer to it. During an emergency, it is important for you, as the adult, to keep calm. If you can keep calm and you can show children that you're in control, and that you're going to help them, and you're going to support them, that gives a little bit of assurance to them. They might not be so anxious or upset, so keep calm as much as you can. I know it might be hard in a real-life situation, but keep that in your mind all of the time. Keep calm for the children. Follow emergency policies and procedures. Well, you can't follow them, if you don't know them. These are things that you should review often, so you know what is in those emergencies, policies and procedures, and act quickly. If you understand what your responsibility is, and you know what the policies and procedures are, it's easier to act quickly because you won't be thinking about what you need to be doing. Your evacuation plan should include the following information. It should include the responsibilities of the staff. I've listed a few responsibilities here. There might be other ones that you want to include, and then you can think about, and that is totally fine, but, who is going to take attendance? Who is going to make sure that all of the children are with you? When you take this attendance, it has to be named to face. Meaning I'm just not counting the children's heads, I'm actually using my attendance sheet, and I'm looking at who is present in my attendance sheet, and I'm looking for that child to make sure that we have that child with us. Just an added piece of security and safety. That is really important. We're taking attendance before we leave the building, and then we're taking attendance when we reach our agreed upon meeting spots. We're taking attendance when we leave, we're taking attendance when we get to our meeting spot just to make sure all the children have come with us. Sometimes you take attendance when you're in the classroom, and a child might turn and walk away, and you might not notice. It's important to maybe double-check as many times and triple check as many times as you can. Who is going to bring out the emergency backpack or the emergency bag? In this bag, you might have items such as blankets, water, maybe some granola bar snacks, the emergency contact lists for the parents, an allergy lists for the children, maybe the doctor information, insurance information for children, and all of that should be going out of the building with you. But who is going to be in charge of taking that out? It's important that you have someone designated to check the bathrooms. Some children might be affected by that loud noise if you're doing a fire alarm, and might go and hide somewhere, and you want to make sure that you have someone who's checking the bathrooms or the entire facility to make sure that no one was left behind. In your evacuation plan also, you want a map of your primary and secondary routes of exit. Through your regulations, there might be available some printouts that you can use to help you make the map, grid paper is always really easy to be able to draw the maps, but you want a primary and a secondary group. We all know if the primary route is unavailable, you can't go out that way. You need to have a different way that you've already got in your mind that you can do. When you're doing those practice drills, it's a good idea to practice also the secondary group, once in a while. In your evacuation plan, you should have the meeting place where you are going to go with all of the children as you leave the building. You want to talk about how you're going to communicate with families. How are you going to notify them if it's an emergency and you can't go back into the building, how are you going to notify them where you are and that they have to come pick up their child. It's important to talk about that with families ahead of time and so that they know what to expect in case of some emergency. How often do you practice the drills? We talked about this a little bit. Make sure you check your regulations and see what is required in those regulations for what drills you have to practice and how often you have to practice them, so your regulations are very important. You should have a printed copy of them somewhere so you can refer to them really easily. I wasn't really sure where I wanted to talk about child abuse. It is like an emergency because either you might not have control over it and it might just happen. I'm putting it in this section. We're going to talk a little bit about child abuse and maltreatment and what your responsibilities are as a child care provider. There are four types of child maltreatment that are often discussed. They are physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. Physical abuse is non-accidental, so it's not an accident. Physical injury to a child by a parent caregiver, or other person responsible for the child. It can include such things and it's not limited to these as striking, kicking, burning, biting, or any action that results in physical harm to the child. The injuries for physical abuse might range from minor bruises to severe fractures to death. This is a tricky one because there are some families that use physical discipline with their children and maybe spanking. It is not considered abuse if it is reasonable, which is a subjective term, and it causes no bodily injury. If there are no bruises or marks on the child, then it is not considered abuse. We should be checking, doing a daily health check every morning when the child arrives in your facility. We're looking for signs of illness. Differences in their complexion and maybe their actions, so sometimes they usually come in really excited, but today they're really lethargic. We're looking for signs of illness, but we're also looking for signs of abuse. We're looking for bruises on a child that we can see. If you see a bruise on a child that they didn't have the day before, it's important that before the parent leaves that you say something to them, I see this bruise on their arm, what happened? You could ask the child while the parent is still there. Then you have the verbal information from the family or the child as to what happened. If it is something that you're a little concerned about, you want to document it and write the date and what the injury is, where it is, and what the response was by the parent or the child. That way if this is a reoccurring incident or incidence, then you have the documentation to say this has happened so many times in this amount of time-frame. When you call, you actually have documentation to help you explain why you're concerned. Emotional abuse is behavior that impairs the psychological capacity or emotional stability of a child. It may include constant criticism, threats, rejection with holding a love or support, or guidance. This one is hard to prove because the person that is investigating must be able to document evidence of harm or mental injury to a child, which can be really difficult to document and to prove. Sexual abuse. Activities by a caregiver, such as fondling, penetration, incest, rape, sodomy, indecent exposure, or exploitation. It is defined by the Federal Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act, and that's a really long definition. I'm not going to read it to you. I'm going to let you read that to yourself. But we need to think about that this happens more than we realize, I guess. If we think about the statistics, one in four girls, and one in 13 boys experience child sexual abuse, and this is information from the CDC website. Approximately 90 percent of child sexual abuse is perpetrated by someone the child or the child's family knows, and that is also documentation from the CDC. This is a tricky one, I think. There are many centers in my area that include some curriculum that helps children to understand the difference between, I don't want to say good touches and bad touches, but that's what's coming to my mind right now. But the importance of their own body and that they have control over what happens to their body and who touches their body and what they do to their body. There are specific curriculums that you can look into that will help you phrase this in child-friendly language, in language that they will understand. Part of the curriculum that I have seen, they show children in bathing suits. The girl child has a two-piece bathing suit on and the boy has a Speedo bathing suit on, I guess. They talk about, in this curriculum, and you teach children in this curriculum, the parts of your body that are under the bathing suit are private parts of your body. They are not meant for other people except doctors; pretty much doctors, I think, is what it talks about. That's a good idea. Sometimes a sticky subject with parents and families. They might not understand why this is important. They might be uncomfortable with it, and not want you to talk about this information with children. But if you put it in child-friendly language and you don't make it scary to them as to what could happen; you just explain that what is it helps. Another piece of information that is really important, and it's funny because I just heard this on the radio the other day. Someone, I listened to NPR in my public radio, in my car when I'm driving to and from work. I've heard this in trainings too with child protective service employees, that you should not label parts of your body with different language like coochie or whatever it is that you call your vagina. You should not name it different things that are less maybe confrontational for some people or less uncomfortable for some people. But if you're doing that, it makes it harder sometimes for child protective people who are talking to children to really determine what has happened. If you labeled correct body parts and you don't make it a stigma, and you don't make a big deal about it, then really it's just a word that describes a piece of your body like your elbow or your shoulder. You can talk about a vagina and a penis in everyday situations with children, maybe in the bathroom or something like that. It's just normal. Make it normal to them. Don't make it taboo to talk about body parts. Another thing that's important when you're talking about abuse is not to lead a child with too many questions. If you are trying to figure out what happened, that you're not giving them suggestions, you're not drilling them. Don't ask a ton of questions. Just write down the information that you have and someone who specializes in this type of situation who is more better trained, is going to come in and talk to the child and they can really understand and get to the bottom of the situation. Neglect is another part of maltreatment that is often discussed, and neglect is a failure of a parent or caregiver to provide for a child's basic needs. There are a few aspects or different topics for neglect that you might see in your area. These are not always included, all four of these, but many of them will be and maybe all of them. You need to look at your area, and go to the child abuse website in your area to determine what neglect includes for you. Physical neglect is the failure to provide necessary food or shelter or appropriate supervision to a child. Medical neglect is failure to provide necessary medical or mental health treatments or withholding medically indicated treatment for life-threatening conditions. Educational neglect, and this is the one you might not always see in all descriptions of neglect, is failure to educate a child or attend to special education needs. Emotional neglect is inattention to a child's emotional needs, failure to provide psychological care, and permitting a child to use alcohol or drugs. We as childcare providers, are considered mandated reporters. A mandated reporter is a person who is legally mandated or required to report any suspicion of child abuse or neglect to children in our care. I'm not saying that you know for sure what is happening, but if you have a suspicion, and that is the really important word here. If you have a suspicion that a child is being abused or neglected, then you are required by law to call the Child Abuse hotline. When you talk to the person on the other end, the person working for the agency, they will take down all of your information and that person will decide and make the decision to go forward with further investigation. Now, up to you. It's up to that person based upon their knowledge, their experience, and what the information that you give them. It's important to have that documentation information when you call. Have all the information documented in front of you. If you're really concerned and you want this to be investigated, have all the information that you can. Again, we are required by law to report any suspicion of child abuse or neglect. The mandated reporter, if you are calling and it's a child in your care. If you think your neighbor is being abused, that does not fall under the mandated reporter. It's children in your care. If you are calling as a mandated reporter, there is a different phone number than the public child abuse hotline phone number. Make sure that you look up in your area what the mandated reporter phone number is, and if you have a suspicion, that is the number you call. If you are at home, and you think that your neighbor's child is being abused in some way, you do not call the mandated reporter helpline. You call the public child abuse hotline. There's a distinction there that we need to make sure that we realize, and I'll say it again, we're required by law as a mandated reporter. Some examples of persons who might be considered mandated reporters are health care workers, school personnel, childcare providers, social workers, law enforcement officers, and mental health professionals. Now this could vary by state, who is considered a mandated reporter. There is a link right here. You can go on and look at your state to see who is considered a mandated reporter in your state. Our quote to end, and that's a heavy topic. "Remember, when disaster strikes, the time to prepare has passed." That's why preparation and planning is so important when we're talking about emergencies. Thank you very much.
