Pardon a personal post this week, but perhaps you'll find this helpful in your family as well. Recently my parents have moved halfway across the country, from Toledo, Ohio, to Liberty Lake, Wash. (near Spokane). This puts them about halfway between my brother in Seattle and me (well, our daughter) in Kalispell, Mont. As they are now a couple of years into retirement, they are starting to deal with some of the health issues that aging brings and have both had surgeries in the past few months.
My father is very good at tracking all sorts of details, but I sometimes am not as good as he is at doing that. So I asked him to stop telling me things like what medications they are on and what doctors they are seeing and to start putting those things into a Google Doc. Now I don't have to worry about if I have saved the most recent version of their information. I know that I always have access via a shared Google Document to an up-to-date list of medications and doctors for each of my parents. They've even discovered that it's worth it to print them out and take this list with them to the hospital as the medical staff keep asking questions that are answered on these lists.
I've thought about trying to do the same thing with members of my youth group, but I'm not so sure that would work out, as I don't know if parents would update the information as faithfully as my father does. Ideally, I would like to house everything on one big Google Spreadsheet, but there are issues with privacy and allowing others to view. So it would probably need to be housed as a collection of Google Documents, each shared with only the family that has their child's health information in it. I may do this as a verification of the information that I've collected this fall before our trip to New Orleans this summer, in order to make sure that everything is still up-to-date.
As with all my posts, I hope you might find this little tip helpful in your life and ministry.
Happy New Year!
(And, just in case you missed it with the Christmas rush, be sure and read my post from a couple weeks ago on A Website that is Guaranteed to Save You Money for all Extravaganza and ELCA Youth Gathering participants!)
My father is very good at tracking all sorts of details, but I sometimes am not as good as he is at doing that. So I asked him to stop telling me things like what medications they are on and what doctors they are seeing and to start putting those things into a Google Doc. Now I don't have to worry about if I have saved the most recent version of their information. I know that I always have access via a shared Google Document to an up-to-date list of medications and doctors for each of my parents. They've even discovered that it's worth it to print them out and take this list with them to the hospital as the medical staff keep asking questions that are answered on these lists.
I've thought about trying to do the same thing with members of my youth group, but I'm not so sure that would work out, as I don't know if parents would update the information as faithfully as my father does. Ideally, I would like to house everything on one big Google Spreadsheet, but there are issues with privacy and allowing others to view. So it would probably need to be housed as a collection of Google Documents, each shared with only the family that has their child's health information in it. I may do this as a verification of the information that I've collected this fall before our trip to New Orleans this summer, in order to make sure that everything is still up-to-date.
As with all my posts, I hope you might find this little tip helpful in your life and ministry.
Happy New Year!
(And, just in case you missed it with the Christmas rush, be sure and read my post from a couple weeks ago on A Website that is Guaranteed to Save You Money for all Extravaganza and ELCA Youth Gathering participants!)
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