We have always kept our children’s immunization up to date. Made sure to get the shot whenever they reached the age that it was required. Unfortunately we have not always been organized. The Dr that we had when our two oldest were born was great. He kept records of everything. Him being organized helped us be unorganized. Over the years as our family expanded, we moved and changed Doctors out of convenience…… So I thought. I am not feeling like its very convenient right now.
Recently one of our kids brought home a letter from their school. Actually the letter was from the Public Health unit. The letter says that they want an updated immunization record of shots given, when and where for our child. If we can not produce this, our child (who has never been in trouble in school before) will be suspended from school until we can show “proof” of immunization. Or schedule to have the shots re administered. Immunization has both its positives and negatives, but we do not want our kids to get additional shots just because we did not keep track
We started trying to find the tiny cardboard like sheets the nurse gave us shortly after our kids where born. You know, the ones for the shots to be recorded in. We have had no luck finding them. I wish we knew this paper was so important when we first got it. Now its time to panic. Now we have to expand our search. Why don’t they express to new parents how important this paper is? I don’t even know where to find these records. I start by calling the health unit that sent the letter. They tell me exactly what records they need and where to “try” and find them.
So for the last three weeks (since immunization records are the parents responsibility) I have been tracking down many years of records. I thought that when we paid to have medical documents transferred from one Dr to the next that it included these records. We were wrong. So I called over to our original Dr who was very organized, for our records (I figured I better get all the kids at once so this doesn’t happen again) The office does not keep records for old patients past three years. Great, now what? They tell me to call the health unit in their area. Thats where they would have sent the records to. So I do. After a long speech from the lady on the phone, about how parents are responsible for their children’s immunization records she agrees to send me out the copies. They arrive incomplete. I call the lady back and she tells me that different organizations do not share information without the patients consent. Since then I have had to call every school, doctor office and health unit my kids have ever visited over the last few years to get a completed copy. Now we just need to wait for them to arrive. I wish we had kept records of all this myself before. I honestly thought that when they submitted information on the computer under our children’s names that it was updating their records.
Hopefully we will have all the papers together by the end of this week. I will copy it for our records and submit it to our local health unit. We will not let this will not happen again. No matter how busy our Dr or nurse is, we will make sure to get our kids little paper record filled out so we can keep track of their shots. This has been a very stressful situation. I hope you all are keeping track of your children’s immunization. You never know when you will be asked to show proof of them. Happy parenting 🙂
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