Health and Safety Basics: Exploring Caring for Our Children

Health and Safety Basics: Exploring Caring for Our Children

April Powell: Welcome, and thank you for standing by. My name is April Powell and I am the resource program manager for the National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness. And I'm pleased to welcome you all to today's webinar. Before we begin the presentation I have just a couple announcements. First, all participants will be muted throughout the presentation portion of the webinar.

There is a slide presentation being shown, but only the webinar staff will have access to changing the slides. If you have a technical question, please type it in a Q&A box for the webinar. There will be a lot that we're going to cover in the next hour, but you can submit your questions at any time by typing them in the Q&A box. Only the webinar staff will see your questions. And some will be able to answer right away, but there are some that we may not be able to cover in the time allotted. But we'll answer those via email after the webinar and we'll take the conversation over to my peers. At the end of the presentation there will be a moderated Q&A.

There will be a video played during the webinar presentation, and only those who are listening through their computer speakers will be able to hear the sound. If you're listening to the webinar by phone you'll need to turn up your computer speakers to hear the sound of the video. Before the close of business today you'll receive an email prompting you to take a post webinar survey. At the end of the survey there will be a link for you to print your own certificate. Lastly, this webinar is being recorded and an archive version along with the slides that are being shown will be available to everyone who attended. And now I'll turn it over to my trusted colleague, John Borrero.

John Borrero: Good afternoon, and good morning to people who are on the West Coast. Welcome to today's webinar, Health and Safety Basics. My name is John Borrero, and I'm here on behalf of the National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness. It's a pleasure to see all of the people logging in. And I'm hoping that we have a really good, informative, engaging session for everyone today. I'm going to try and get as much information as I can into the hour that we have together. So here we go. So first of all, I'm here on behalf of the National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness. And some people may know what that is and some may not, so I thought I would start with a description of that. By the way, if you're having trouble hearing still, continue to put your messages in the message box because we're handling those separately as well. So the National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness has a vision. And our vision is to create resources and provide professional development and guidance to people in the early childhood community. We focus specifically on health professionals, and we also have materials for families and teachers as well.

Our catchment area is chosen from zero to five, from birth to five. So that gives you a little bit of background and who we are. But I'm located at the American Academy of Pediatrics outside of Chicago in Illinois. But we're a pretty expansive team around the country. There are a lot of us, so I want to take a moment to acknowledge who is part of our team. So we have UCLA and Georgetown and EDC as partner of ours as well, as well as NRC, Zero to Three, Nemours, and Childcare Aware. Some of those names I'm sure are familiar to people who are attending today. But the message is that we've got a great team and we've got a big team of people across the country. And it's only with their support that we all get this work done. Our audience aside from what I said to you today includes Head Start folks and child care folks. So our focus is early childhood, so we're really trying to capture all of the people who work with children from zero to five. So we make materials for TA providers, we make materials for child care health consultants we focus a lot of our time on working with CCR&Rs, but we're also concerned about the federal picture as well. So we're trying to do everything we can to really have an impact. And with that, let's get started. So health.

Now, we start with the assumption that everyone has the same impression of what health is, but there was a time when health was just safety and injury prevention. But I think one lesson that we've learned is there's more to that. There's more than just safety and injury prevention. Maybe 40, 50 years ago, this is what we meant by health, but there's a lot more now. When we first started doing this work on this level, this is how we understood health by what you see on the screen now. So we knew that oral health and mental health and that understanding challenging behaviors had to do with understanding children's development and their behavior. And that's part of our topic as well. Safety and injury prevention is still an important factor, but we realize that it's not enough on its own. So take a look at the list that we have on the screen. This is how we started our work. And even with this expansive of a list of what health entails, we realize as we started doing the work a few years in, that there was more to it. So our list expanded. I'm about to put that on your screen expanded to these topics. So even though we knew that there were issues around health equity in the community, we realized that we've had to put more of an intentional effort on to it. Many people on the call probably also have had some experience with opioid use and the opioid epidemic that's sweeping our country. So that's become something of a concern for us as well. We're trying better to understand the needs of homeless families and children of homeless families and how we can help support their health care needs as well within their programs.

And we started to expand out to look more at what's happening in the family child care, to look at the role of childcare health consultants. And we're doing a lot of really exciting work around those to put something out there that really impacts people. I'm hoping that people are able to hear and able to see the screen because we're about to have our first poll. Let's do that now. This is for me to get a sense of where people are, and this will also tell me that people are hearing me. But this will be able to get a sense of where people are in terms of their knowledge. So part of the content for today is around Caring for Our Children Basics that are on the federal document. So you got four options here. Are you an expert? Do you have a good amount of knowledge? Would you say you have very little knowledge, or are you among the group of people who has no idea what CFOC Basics is? I'm going to give you a moment to enter your responses. It's really interesting. So I see that the greater majority of people have a good amount of knowledge. We have a few experts in the room, which is great. Welcome.

And good, I appreciate the honesty of people who have no idea what it is, because I'm starting with the assumption that everyone needs some information about it. Okay. Good. About 450 participants. So that is where our polls ended up. Most people on the call have a good amount of knowledge around CFOC basics, followed by some people who have very little knowledge. Great. Great. So hopefully I'll have new knowledge for you and that we'll be able to add to what you already have. And for those who have no idea, I'm hoping that you'll leave today with some idea. Move forward to it. Let's move forward to our next slide then. Okay. Some of the questions you might have in your mind right now are, what is Caring for Our Children? What is Caring for Our Children Basics? Is it the same? I get this question a lot. Are they different? Are they the same? And we're going to answer those today. But before we answer those, we have a little bit of a story. And for those of you who work with me and train with me before, you know I'm a little bit of a storyteller. So let's go ahead and start our storytelling. So this is the story of Caring for Our Children Basics and how it came to be what it is today. Decades of research have changed how we understand the years from birth to five.

Now, whether we're talking about the classroom, families, or health services, pretty much the message has been consistent. And those of us who've been in early childhood field for a long time know that we're hearing more and more an acknowledgment that early childhood is important. And that's really been key for us in the work that we've been doing. So it's not a mistake with the acknowledgment of the importance of early childhood that as the research voice has grown, so has the government support for early care and education. And we're happy about that. One example of this support, we'll remember was which was seen as a big victory for early care and education, was the reauthorization of Head Start in 2007. This was a big deal. And whenever legislation passes, we find that the community becomes invigorated and inspired and we all come together.

And people start to look at how they're invested in children and what our investment shows and means. So people from the community meet, they come together, they become more aware. And then we get a climate the way we have today where we have talking points that come out in the community, such as viewpoints of health and how health is the foundation for school success. We hear a lot about how the quality of teachers and providers is key, so that training resources are important. And we hear about the importance of families. These are big, big messages that are coming because we understand that early childhood is more than babysitting, that there's a lot that goes into it and that it requires experience. So in 2014, which brings us closer to today, we also had another milestone and that was the reauthorization of child care. And that was a big deal. It was the first time that this had happened since 1998, and I'm sure a lot of people on today's call remember that. But once again, this new legislation brought a wave of momentum. And that's I think the wave that we're in today. And in this wave, health came up as a priority. It hadn't always been so clearly identified before for child care. And so this was a new moment for those of us who were working in the community. And this is the climate into which Caring for Our Children Basics was created. So Caring for Our Children Basics is a set of standards that's intended to be used by all providers.

Now, we're more than aware that there are some people who have more knowledge and some people who have less knowledge. What we wanted to do is to create a ground. This is the first time that any effort had been put into creating a ground of knowledge that everyone would have, but it was also the first time that we'd looked at this community in this way with health, and thought about everyone all at once. And the fact that there's a document out there, CFOC Basic, exists is proof that we're looking at the community this way, that we're looking at all children from zero to five in terms of their needs instead of where they find themselves in the classroom. So that was important. But with this foundation in health and safety, we started to look at our common view of children. So in 2016, the Head Start performance standards were revised and published. And that'll be familiar to people. That was the first time that had happened since the 1970s. So that was significant. In the same year, Guidance for Child Care was released. Now, for those people who aren't working in both communities that may have seemed coincidental, but it wasn't an accident that these both happened at the same time. Even though these are two programs that exist in separate buildings, what we really wanted was one neighborhood. We wanted them all together. We wanted to think of children under one lens.

So it's not an accident that these conversations all happened at the same time around new standards. So in ways that really matter, it's important to realize that the shared language is important. Each document, the Head Start Program performance standards and the child care health and safety requirements both mentioned Caring for Our Children Basics by name. So it's written in there. And when it's written to a published document or into guidance or legislation it's meaningful. And so we take it very seriously. In ways that matter, Caring for Our Children Basics was used as a way to start the important work of refining our vision of healthy children. And not just healthy children, but healthy families and healthy early childhood communities, wherever they found themselves in our community. And this was just the beginning. And what an exciting time it is for those of us who have dedicated our careers to advancing children and families. I think as long as I've been in my career, we've always been a work in progress, a beautiful work in progress. But today that work includes children's health and something we can be really happy about and look forward to.

So that's my two minute, what is CFOC Basics background. And let's move a little more into detail to talk about what Caring for Our Children Basics is. So it's a framework. It's a voluntary framework for aligning health and safety efforts and standards across different settings. So we know, as I said before, that there are programs around the country that are either based in health settings or based in hospitals or have really advanced ways of working in health that have a lot of this content already. We also know that there are programs for home, health and safety are new. We want it to catch everyone. We want to give everyone a minimum starting place for understanding health and safety and for embedding health and safety into their practice. It's also meant to be a guide for state based work. We know that when we look at how legislation happens at a state level, we know that states have to consider everyone. They have to consider this range that I just talked about. So that I'm having some sort of minimal guideline was really important for having something that everyone could use.

So it's also a tool that you can use. And I'll speak more specifically about how you can use that to improve your efficiency, how you can monitor your programs. You should be able to use CFOC Basics or Caring for Our Children Basics to examine your own practice. And it should be something to give you a sense of where you can grow. So it'll tell you where you are, but it'll tell you the minimum of what you should be achieving. And that'll tell you where you should go from there. Let's look inside the book. These are the chapters that are part of Caring for Our Children Basics. Okay. So some of the chapters may make sense and some of them may take a little bit of work to understand, but take a look, see. A lot of them will reflect-- the biggest chapter is health promotion and protection. And that's one that serves a little bit of a catch all for lots of different health topics. Now, there's a reason why these are the chapters. These are the chapters because there are two documents. This one, Caring for Our Children Basics and Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition, which is the original document.

And there was an attempt to use the same chapter. So I'll tell you more about that in a second, but know that there's intentionality to where these came from. But let's take a step back before we talk about Caring for our Children, 3rd Edition, and let's talk about what guidelines are already out there in the community. So those people who are child care funded and who are following what's happening with CCDBG and your guidelines around how your childcare program should operate, those of you will know that there are health and safety training topics that have been put out. And these are those topics here on your screen right now. So the 12 topics that you're seeing on your screen-- and I paraphrase them from the guidance in the legislation to give you a sense of what you should be training. And so this is what the government says you should be having as minimal training. So these are your topics. Okay. Now, one of the bits of feedback that we got when this came out was oh, 12 more things for us to do, 12 more topics for us to train on. But there was thought that was put into that first.

So one thing that you should know and you should take away from this presentation today is that it's meant to be additional work. There was thought that these training topics were put out at the same time as Caring for Our Children Basics, and it was put out at the same time that the legislation was changed. So there was a conversation that included all of this thought so that they would all be aligned. So here you have your topics and here you'll recognize the chapters from CFOC Basics. Here you have the chapters, and you'll see that the training topics fit into the different chapters of Caring for Our Children Basics. That was intentional. This was done intentionally.

Chapters were chosen for Caring for Our Children Basics that would go along with the health and safety training topics. So you shouldn't have to conduct multiple trainings. If you engage in the health and safety training topics, you should have a basis for using CFOC Basics as well to support your work. So there is the first level, is understanding the training topics. And then there's Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition. For Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition, it's a little bit different. Let's open that book and see what that looks like. So here are the chapters for Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition. You'll see the chapters in black are the chapters that both books have in common. So it's mostly the same.

There are two chapters in Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition that are different. One chapter on working with children with special health care needs and disabilities, and another one on licensing. Aside from that, they have the same structure, the same framework, but not the same content. Let's look at the content for each of them. So here are some ways in which they are different. Caring for Our Children Basics is meant to be the minimum set of health and safety standards. So it's the least amount of work that you should do. It's the ground level work.

So you should aspire to cover everything that's in Caring for Our Children Basics and have that reflected in your practice. It's a place from which to [INAUDIBLE]. Now, Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition is different. Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition is meant to be a comprehensive catchall collection of standards and where we make an effort to cover almost every eventuality that you could find. Now, that's one way in which they're different. Let's talk about that in more detail. Both Caring for Our Children's are broken into standards, but Basics has 72 health standards and Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition has 686 standards. So they're different, and you can imagine why. Imagine working with a program that had never really utilized health and safety standards before. And think about different challenge.

One where you're introducing 72 standards that they should incorporate into their work, and one where you're introducing 686 standards into their work. You can see that we needed a way to give people a mountain that they can climb.

We wanted to set people up to succeed. We didn't want to set people up to fail. And I think there was a common thought that if we start with the end goal of what the ideal is, then we will be setting up a lot of people to fail. So a document was created at the federal level to make that transition, to build that bridge. So Caring for Our Children Basics is 72 standards, which are currently located on the Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center web site. CFOC, 3rd Edition is located on the NRC Kids website. That's on your screen now. They're both updated on a regular basis. So they have that in common, but they're very different collections of materials. So with that under our belts, thinking about the different sources of knowledge that you have. So we talked about the health and safety training topics. We didn't talk as much about licensing requirements, but that's where you start, which is where-- we don't talk about that on this presentation because it's different for each area that you're in. In terms of best practice, you should start by knowing what your local regulations are and what your local requirements are. And you should go from there to understanding the health and safety training topics. So the list that I shared with you today of the 12 topics should be part of your practice. The 3rd item is understanding Caring for Our Children Basics. That's your starting point.

Now, many people will look at the local licensing requirements and understand the training topics, and just use Caring for Our Children Basics. And that work will be enough. And that's okay. That may be where you are today, that may be where your program is today. But if you find yourself in a place where the information you need goes beyond what you have from your health and safety training work, and it goes beyond what's in Caring for Our Children Basics, then your next step is to look into Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition. This is why they're aligned. They're aligned so that you can use one when you need to and use the other when it's necessary. If you should find yourself to be in a position where none of those resources give you guidance, then you have TA providers. And we're one. We're a national team provider. So you have resources such as our center, but also your local resources as well, and listed on the screen. So these are the five steps that I'm recommending. And what I would like to do is I'd like to take some time practicing these steps together. It's how I like to do my workshops. Let's give you some guidance, and then let's practice the guidance together.

So since we're not all in the classroom together and we don't have real situations that we can talk about, what I want to do is I want to show a video. And so this is the time where you're only going to be able to hear the video on the computer. So for those of you who have both, this is the time coming up to turn up your volume on your computer because that's the way the webinar program works, is that you'd only be able to hear the sound from your computer. Okay. So that's our little prep. But let's practice. We're going watch a video. It's about two minutes long. So for those of you who can't hear the video, it'll be about a two minute silence. And this is meant to put us in the context of what would happen in the program.

So think about it that way. No matter where you are, whether you're a teacher or a provider in a program, or if you're a nurse -- I say we have a variety of people on today's webinar. Think about where you place in society and what your role is and what your response would be to a situation like the one we're going to see in this video. So the subject we're going to talk about is, is safe sleep. And I intentionally chose one that I think is a topic around the country. So let's go ahead and start that. I'll come back after the video and then we'll have some dialogue. Here we go. [Video clip begins]

Jack Tramel: Each year in the United States approximately 3,500 infants die from sleep-related deaths. In hopes of reducing that number, the American Academy of Pediatrics has just released its latest safe sleep recommendations.

Woman: The safest place for the baby to sleep is in a crib or a bassinet or a playpen, something that's separate from where the parent is sleeping. And the only thing that should be in the crib should be a tight fitting mattress with a tight fitting sheet and the baby. Nothing else. There should be no bumper pads, no pillows, no blankets, no stuffed animals. Just the crib, the mattress and the baby.

Jack: Dr. Sam and Mora Hanky know too well the tragedy of losing a baby to sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, when six years ago Sam and their newborn son Charlie were napping together on the sofa.

Mora Hanky: The one time he wasn't in his crib was that horrible night.

Jack: The risk of SIDS is five times higher if a baby is placed on any soft or squishy surface, such as couches, pillows, or blankets. Doing so can create an air pocket making it difficult for the baby to breathe. Bed sharing also increases the chance of SIDS.

Woman: We know that bringing the baby in the bed with you surrounding the baby with soft bedding so the baby doesn't fall onto a hard surface. All of these things that parents think are going to keep their babies safe, in reality make it more dangerous for their baby.

Mora: The image of putting a baby to sleep in an empty crib, I think is --   feels cold and harsh. In reality, it's very safe. It's the best thing you can do for your baby.

Dr. Sam Hanky: As a parent and as a pediatrician I did what I thought was best for my child. I didn't think that SIDS could happen to me, but it did happen to me and it can happen to anyone. And that is why it is so important to follow these recommendations for each and every sleep, at nap time and at nighttime. I'm Jack Tramel.

[Video clip ends]

John: Okay. So one thing that I really love about that video is that it presents not just the professional perspective, but also a personal perspective. And I think, especially with safe sleep, I think that's really part of our experience. I think all of us providers who work in early care and education, when we think about safe sleep and we think about the recommendations -- usually when I show this video I start by asking the audience, how many people engage in safe sleep practices at home? And pretty universally, people talk about how there's a difference between their personal practice and their professional practice. So I think safe sleep is really a powerful topic for that. So I always start by saying, let's put ourselves in the context of our professional work, let's acknowledge our personal practices and how that might impact our feelings about safe sleep, but then also transition into how we can respond to this as professionals. So let's look at the best practice guidelines that we came up with a moment ago, and let's go through those. So the first step here in thinking about how we respond to this video would be looking at your local licensing requirements and what your local requirements are, like what your local expectations are. That would be where you would start.

And that's going to be different for everyone. But in terms of having an expectation for safe sleep training, that should cut across all funding sources and all requirements. It's a requirement for Early Head Start. It is also a requirement for child care. So that should be regardless of your context. It should be something that you're engaging in. So you start with local work and then you move from there to understanding the health and safety training topics. Now, we know already that safe sleep is required and to require training. And whether or not you've met the requirements is something that's decided through your monitoring. So it's not something that we decide. For example, this training wouldn't meet your qualifications for that. But those are things that would happen locally. It would go through your local CCR&R, or you work with your local TA providers to help get more clarity on that. But that's individual. So once you have knowledge of where the Health and Safety required training topics come into play as you have here, then you can look at the 3rd item. And that's Caring for Our Children Basics. So let's dig into this one a little bit deeper to really look at it. So for most people, Caring for Our Children Basics you'll access online, but there is a printed version out there. And this is what it looks like.

So for those of you who have it, I thought we'd give you a picture of what it looks like. So this is Caring for Our Children Basics, the last printed version. And so if you open it, you'll see a table of contents and you'll also see that there's a standard around safe sleep practices and SIDS risk reduction. It's standard 3.1.4.1. Now, the number on the left is significant and it's the number that you want to remember because it's the same number that you're going to find in Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition. That was intentional as well. We kept the number of the standard so that you could cross reference with other resources.

Okay.

So the safe sleep standards 3.1.4.1. And here's what it says in Caring for Our Children Basics. You can take a moment and read that. And by the way, I'm looking at some of the questions. We'll have a question period at the end. And we're saving some of the questions that I may not cover until the end so we can talk about as many as we can. But keep asking them. We're going to put them on a queue. So you see that there is a safe sleep standard. This is what it tells you. It tells you that safe sleep is important. It ranked high enough to be one of the standards that was chosen for Caring for Our Children Basics. And it's something that everyone should be considering. So where this is the set of minimum standards, it was decided that among the minimum standards safe sleep should have a place. So it tells you that. There's a lot of detail that goes into it and the recommendation from here was for you to go to the American Academy of Pediatrics Guidance, or to look at Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition.

Okay. So it tells you it's important, but it doesn't give you all the information that you might need. So if you were looking to respond to an incident like this you might not have enough here. This is one way to access Caring for Our Children Basics. But let's look at the online way. Now, for people who don't know where the Early Childhood Learning and Knowledge Center is, we affectionately call it the ECLKC. The address is at the top of your screen. But if you ever Google ECLKC, at the top of your screen there's a wealth of information on this website, not just for Head Start, but for Head Start and child care both that cuts across different early childhood environments. And there's a lot of information there that those of us who put all this work into it. I suspect that a lot of people who need it don't find it.

So we can never do enough work to make sure people are finding it. So from the main screen of the ECLKC, I would enter CFOC Basics into the search bar. And they would take me to this screen. So this is an online database of all of the standards in CFOC Basics. Now, remember, it was 3141. So we go up to chapter three, which is health promotion, and we would click there. And in there, we'd be guided to safe sleep practices. So it's the same exact standard that you saw in the printed version. The difference would be that as we update standards they'll be updated on the website. And as you know what happens with printed materials is that it's only updated at the printing. So if you want to, be sure to always have the most current standards. You should practice accessing the standards on the website. So you would Google ECLKC and you would search for CFOC Basics, or Caring for Our Children Basics. And that would be my recommendation that you use that database to remain up to date on what the standards say for Caring for Our Children Basics. So there we have two different ways to access Caring for Our Children Basics. So whenever they do that, let's say we have an incident in the program where we have a concern raised by families and we're not sure how to respond. So similar to what we were exposed to in the video. And we go to our health and safety training topics and we know that it's a topic that we're training on, but we're not experts on it. We're not quite there. And then we turn to CFOC Basics, and we know it's there, but maybe not enough information for us to use to act upon. Then we will look into Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition.

So let's do that. Let's see how those are different. Caring for Our Children has its own separate database. It's not on the same website as what I just showed you. To the left, that image is what the actual book looks like. This is the Caring for Our Children, 3rd Edition book. It's been a few years since its last published. So what you need to know is that the most current set of resources and standards is only available on the website. Today, the book is a few years out of date, although it still has a lot of great information. The most current information will be found from the website, the nrckids.org website that you're seeing on the screen. Now, what you see on the screen is the main page to that. You would navigate to that website and on the left is a bar that you would click to access the Caring for Our Children database. Thank you, but there's a link that's going on your screen now with NRC Kids database. And you click on Browse to see if we see three standards, and you would answer 3141. You could also enter the topic, if you wanted to enter safe sleep you could as just seen on the screen now. And it would take you to the actual standard. So let's take a moment and look and see how this is different. Right away you can see that they're different in length. Where the other one was relatively brief, this one clearly goes into greater detail. It gives you a little bit of a sense of the importance of safe sleep. Even in the first page, there's more information than you see, but all of the different circumstances that you might want to consider when thinking about safe sleep.

So it goes into great detail, it'll speak about a variety of settings, a variety of circumstances that you might find yourself in, and ways in which you might have to think about the standard. And after it gives you an overview of the standard, it gives you rationale. So it tells you why this is important and why the information is useful for you. Why a standard was created around this topic. So to go into a rationale and talk about the importance of the standard for providers, and then there are comments. So comments might give you a little bit of a history of where the standard came from. It might tell you a little bit about the issues that surround the standard. Think that didn't quite fit into the other two topics, but part of the dialogue that we felt that people should have. Then after comments, you'll have a sense of other standards that are related to that.

So this is all extra information you're getting from the CFOC 3rd Edition It'll tell you of the standards that are related. So for example, for safe sleep, beyond thinking about safe sleep you'd also want to think about sleeping equipment and cribs and crib toys and feeding infants. So that speaks to whether or not you would to not giving a child a bottle when they sleep in the crib by themselves. So it gives you a more complete picture about what other areas you might wander do when you start talking about safe sleep. And then we give you references. So every place that was used to gather the information on this resource on this standard. So if you should find that there's an area that a little bit of a lack of clarity on something, or maybe your specific situation isn't exactly addressed here, but you think you might be able to go to the original article or the original resource to get some of the details you needed, then you have the list of references here below it. And then any notes. The notes are usually around when it was edited last.

So you have a sense of how frequently it was edited. Now, what goes into the editing is our team at NRC looks at what research has come out. They look at what common practice is in the field, what best practice is, whether or not there have been any kinds of national dialogues or incidents that have happened that have made us really examine our practice, whether there have been new developments or new factors at play. For example, not for this standard, but when we were looking at a standard on smoking, there was initially a standard 10 years ago on smoking that was really clear. But as the community has evolved and we have different kinds of smoking and we have electronic cigarettes and vaping, there was a need to look back at that standard to cover-- and that marijuana's legal in some states, there was a need to go back and to cover smoking again and to ensure we re-evaluate our wording to make sure that people could rely upon the wording that was there. So there's an example of how that really talented team at NRC looks at what's happening in society and ensure that standards are reflecting what's happening outside of your practice. So that it should be a resource that you can look at, even if you don't understand all the issues that are happening.

So there's a lot. The message here that there's a lot of information that would help you dig deeper into what you started with CFOC Basics. If you should look at your local licensing requirements and you look at your Health and Safety training topics and your CFOC Basics and you access the database in CFOC 3rd Edition and you still feel as if you need more support, then it will be time to reach out to your local support or your TA providers. So I said before that we're an example of a national TA provider. And you'll have local and regional TA providers as well that you should be familiar with in your practice. You can reach out to help specialists and help managers, to child care consultants. And we make an effort also to make this information available to pediatricians. So any people working in health and other [? childhoods ?] should have access to these collections. And so we're hoping that that'll be-- your five step resource. So these five steps are what we recommend for making sure that you have the most current information. And this is how you use care for children basics and that. In terms of looking at the TA, you have at your disposal-- let's look a little bit about what we'll provide because it's more than just today's webinar, but there is a collection of resources that we have.

Now, I've decided to highlight a few of them here. When you receive the copy of these PowerPoints, you'll also have-- you'll also have the links to these resources on the ECLCK. So you see, we have resources around safe sleep, and we have specific resources around safe sleep that are intended for childcare health consultants. So this is to cover both bases. This is information for people at program level, but also information for people who support people at program level. We have a wonderful resource on active supervision that's really -- that's championed by our team at EDC out of Massachusetts. They're a great team of people that work with us. We have Oral Health, which is from our Oral Health team. We have a lot of information on nutrition and positive eating and healthy, active living.

And we have a collection of resources that's intended for families. They're called the Health Tips for Families. And these cover a range of topics. And one thing that I'm really proud about with this is that we have it available-- we have it available in many, many different languages. So you'll see-- you'll see them in English and Spanish. You'll also see them in Chinese, and Arabic, and a couple of other languages as well. So I think when you get the links, or if you want to look for these-- with this title on the ECLKC, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised at where we've really made an effort to make sure that these materials are available across your community regardless of language barriers. And we're still adding to those languages. So there's more to come in that.

So one way in which we try and support your work or your search for TA is around creating resources. Another way is that we have this webinar series. Now, today is just one of the webinars. But on your screen in front of you or some of the other webinars that we've offered. So influenza is a common one. We offer that one every year. We had a webinar in physical activity, oral health, important of tummy time. And the image you see is from our tummy time information. Nutrition -- there are other -- today's webinar wasn't a safe sleep webinar. Today's webinar was on CFOC basics. But we have-- we do have a safe sleep webinar as well. And one of the presenters for that is our own Doctor Moon, who is the pediatrician that you saw in the video. We've had really powerful webinars on shaken baby syndrome and mental health consultation as well. We have a really talented range of people who present these and that we're very proud of. So they're good. And once they're finished, they're archived. So you should be able to access them also on that ECLKC. Beyond our webinars, we have -- we have an active schedule of webinars coming up. So here you have today with the late April, early May CFOC basics webinar. But here's some other webinars that are coming down the pike as well. We have Child Abuse and Neglect, Vaccines and Developmental Milestones.

That one is for child care health consultants specifically. Speaking of that, we have webinars specifically designed for child care health consultants. And when we have the webinar, we collect questions and topics for the following webinar. But we have our-- we have one coming up in May, and then we have the following in September. June and July, we have Responsive Feeding and Community Linkages. We have-- in August, we'll talk about some materials that were created for child care health consultants now. And December has us talking about abusive head trauma. So you're getting an inside scoop into what's coming down the pike for us in terms of webinars like the one today. Aside from webinars, we have-- we have a series of tip sheets that we have also available on the ECLKC. Now these are meant to be straightforward. Many of them are plain language tips. They're meant to be something that you could use quickly and that you could share within your program and with your families to give you all the information you might need to engage in proper practice. So the example that we have here is one on bed bugs. It's been, unfortunately, a very popular topic. Head lice is another big one that we get, asthma. We've had a lot of internal dialogue recently around food allergies. As the summer, has hopefully spring arrives, and we move into summer, we'll talk more about summer safety and sun safety. So we try and -- we try and also put our materials and hold webinars that are relevant to where we are and to what's going on around us. We had a lot of work recently on emergency preparedness as our country dealt with a few tragedies in different areas of the country.

So we try to stay timely as well. And hopefully you'll see that in our resources and in our materials. We've talked a lot about these resources you see in front of you, Caring for Our Children Basics and Caring for Our Children. These are resources that, as I mentioned before, but in case I wasn't clear enough, that we update and that we maintain. So these are products. We have Caring for Our Children on the left in English. And we have it in Spanish as well. So that's a resource that you can share with Spanish-speaking programs or with Spanish-speaking families as well. It's meant for that. It's meant to be shared across different languages. Those are the languages we have right now. Caring for Our Children, third edition, right now is only available in English. But these three documents are our source materials for this content. Now stepping-- I'm going to answer the question that I see there right now in front of you. So Caring for Our Children Basics has 72 standards. Caring for Our Children, third edition has 686 standards. And Stepping Stones has 129 standards. And the difference is the Stepping Stones is a collection of resources-- a collection of standards that was put together a few years ago to speak specifically to the standard that speak to child morbidity.

So these are the ones that -- these are the standards that if followed should help to do their best to protect children from situations where they could -- where there could be child fatalities or serious child injuries. So that's the answer to the question that came up from Bonnie here. And that one I didn't include in here because I was focusing specifically on CFOC basics and how you can use that. But absolutely Stepping Stones is another resource that can be used in your equation. So these are our source materials. In addition to our source materials, we make some care to help you use Caring for Our Children and Caring for Our Children Basics. So on the left you see the screenshot of an assessment tool that we have. So again, this will be an active link in the PowerPoint that you get after today's presentation. But it's an online tool that you can use that pretty much mimics the standards in Caring for Our Children basics but list them as a checklist. So you can go through your program.

Or if you're working with a program, you can go through the program that you're working with, and you could check through and see which standards are in place, and you can also identify the ones around which they'll need some support. On the right is a screenshot of a program that we have called VEEC. It's called Virtual Early Education Class-- Center, sorry-- Virtual Early Education Center. Now this is, I think -- honestly this is one of our most under-appreciated, underutilized resources. But it's an amazing resource that a lot of people have put a lot of time and work into. So it's a classroom. It looks like a -- it's a center full of classes of different ages. And it allows you -- it allows the user to go into each classroom, to click on an area of the classroom. And in that area you'll see the rationale similar to what we saw in CFOC, third edition, the reason why that area is important. And then you'll have a listing of the standards in Caring for Our Children Basics and third edition and the Head Start Program performance standards listed under each area of VEEC. So it's a great resource. And I would encourage you, when you receive this, to look through it and to familiarize yourself with it because it's valuable, especially if you want to have a sense of standards, and you want it in the context of your classroom practice. That's something that VEEC does that the books won't do.

They won't tell you what's relevant to your kitchen, or what's relevant to the eating area, or what's relevant to a play area or the playground. So it's a great resource to use in conjunction with the other ones. And then we have -- before we start to move toward the end of our presentation today, we have some upcoming resources to let you know about, some things coming down the pike. So we have a series of car seat safety flip charts that I think are actually out. They just came out. And we have a tip sheet that we're working on around homelessness. I said before that that was a new evolving issue. Even though we've always obviously always had homeless kids in our program, we're becoming-- it's becoming more clear that we have to have resources and TA that's targeted specifically to that situation. We have an emergency preparedness manual that's coming out soon. And that one specifically is redesigned to have a lot of child care content and also to speak to family childcare. We have a series of family Child Care Tip sheets that we're working on. So for our family child care partners out there, know that there are materials coming that have your name on them. And for those -- also for those programs that engage in partnership with family child care, we're creating material specifically to speak to your circumstance, to your situations. For the Health Tips for Family series, we're looking at expanding those languages. And we started with a great list of languages, and we're looking at-- we're looking at what other needs to have. Now, these might not necessarily to be languages that lots of people speak, but we're looking to find out about what the deepest pockets of need are around our country.

So are there languages that nothing ever gets translated into where we might have a community of 1,000 people who all need resources in that language but never get anything? That's what we're trying to find out. We're taking a real public health perspective to figure out where the need is, who has the least resources and to cover some of those gaps. And then finally one that I'm really excited about is we have a series of modules coming out soon for training child care health consultants. So these are self-guided modules for consultants to look at to help them strengthen their practice, to help them think about how they work with programs, and how they work effectively in the community not just within programs, but also in the community outside of programs. So we're all really proud of what's coming out with those as well. And thanks for the language recommendation. I actually think Marshallese is one of the languages that we had recommended to us.

There are some languages that we've had translated already, and some that are on our queue to be translated next, so I appreciate those recommendations. So we have a second poll. And this is our pretest, post-test, this is me being -- this is me trying to be a teacher. But what I'd like to do now is have everyone take the second poll around how familiar you feel you are now with Caring for Our Children Basics. This is the same exact poll that you took early on. But we like to see -- we like to see what impact we had from today's work and whether there are people who feel as if they have stronger knowledge. So I'll give people a moment and see what this poll turns up. Okay, and I think the last couple have trickled -- there's a few more trickling in. So it looks like -- let's go to the results. [Inaudible] So I'm happy to say that 83 percent of the people on today's call feel that they have a good amount of knowledge around basics, which makes me happy. And we have a few more experts then we did when we started the call, which is wonderful as well. So that's because the more people who know about this the better. So let's-- as we come to the end of our what I knew it was going to be a very quick hour for us, let's look at some of the questions that came up today and some reflections from today. So we started today by talking about a little bit of the history, history of where the CFOC Basics came from. And hopefully what I talked -- what people understood from what I said today was how Caring for Our Children Basics is different from third edition.

I hope people also heard how you can use Caring for Our Children Basics in your practice, and how it aligns with the other expectations that you have that are kind of swimming around in our environment, so one of them being the Health and Safety Training topic, that list that comes with CCDBG funding. And another one is a reminder to think about your local licensing requirements and how you can use Caring for Our Children Basics as a starting point, but that by no means should it be the end of your growth in health and safety, how there are other resources out there. There's Caring for Our Children, third edition for that deeper dive. And even beyond that, you have health professionals and TA professionals around you who are willing to take you to the next step. So let's look at some-- so one of the questions that came is actually relevant to what I just said. Does Caring for our Children, third edition, mesh both the 12 required training topics along with the CFOC basics? So Caring for Our Children, third edition, has all of the content that CFOC Basics has. Some of the standards in CFOC Basics have been abridged, but the topics are all there. So as you saw with Safe Sleep, there's a Safe Sleep standard.

It's not as extensive as a standard in CFOC third edition. So if you're looking at Safe Sleep as an example, it's in third edition, and it's also in Basics. So all of the 12 topics are covered in both just to different degrees. So the answer to that question is, yes, they're all covered there. And what most people don't know is that that was an intentional process. There were no topics that were suggested for training topics that weren't also included in Basics so that you should be able to use Basics if that's where you are in your development. But by all means, everything that's in Basics is also in third edition in more detail. If you don't have Early Head Start, do we need to do a training on safe sleeping? So the requirement for doing trainings around safe sleeping is consistent for both. It's a Head Start requirement, and an Early Head Start requirement. And it's also a requirement for anyone who's-- who under childcare, who seeks block grant funding. So the requirement may be different in your area, and the climate is different depending on where you are, but the requirement to do training on safe sleep is consistent. It's across the board. It's a part of this new way of thinking that is so much a part of where we are today. Not that Head Start kids need training-- Head Start providers need training on CFOC, but child care providers don't. It's the mentality of, we all work with children from zero to five, no matter where their funding comes from, no matter what seat their in in a classroom.

And all providers who work with younger children should have knowledge of safe sleep practices. So that's consistent with that. A few of the others, there are other centers that work with us on the national level who have done resources around the standard. So we have a question that came in around whether or not there's a resource by OHS that outlines the Head Start Program performance standards and compares it to other requirements. And there is. It's not out of OHS, but it's by one of our national centers. And we can share that with you in the questions afterwards. I can send links to some of the other crosswalks that other centers have done.

One was done by one of the national centers, the Poverty Center on just that. And should all centers-- Should all Head Start centers be using the guidelines in CFOC3? What all centers-- what all centers should do is they should look at where their practice is. So my recommendation is beyond licensing and beyond looking at what your local training is, start with CFOC Basics if you're not familiar with either one, and look and see where your practice aligns with Caring for Our Children Basics. That's should be your starting point. That should be the minimum that you accomplish. If you find that you go through those 72 standards, and you're all set. And you feel as if you've gotten training around those, your staff is really well versed in that, and your knowledge exceeds what's in Caring for Our Children Basics, then by all means, the Caring for Our Children, third edition, should be your resource.

But I recommend doing it in that order to make sure that you cover the minimum. In addition to the breadth and Caring for Our Children Basics, just those 72 standards should be -- you should be sure that they're part of your minimum practice. So I've appreciate it greatly the questions today. Let me say that from the perspective of someone who's been a career long trainer and a teacher -- and I'm by trade, I started my career up at a preschool and then an infant-toddler teacher myself-- it's always a pleasure for me to speak to people from the community. And we embrace every opportunity that we have here at the Academy and at the National Center to impact change at community level. So anything that we can do after today to answer questions, to give your resources, we're happy to.

We're happy to do anything we can do to help make the lives of children and families in our community more healthy, and more safe, and better. Thank you-- thank you for attending today's webinar. Thank you for your time today. Continue to send us questions afterwards. And you have our -- you will have in one second, have our-- there you go. You have our contact information on the slide now. That's our phone number and our email. Don't hesitate to reach out to us if there's some way that we can support you in your practice. It was a pleasure speaking with everyone today. And I hope that some of the information today makes it way to program level, and that was good information for you to use. Thank you all for attending today.

[End video]

Close