Call for Nominations: Child Advocates

G.W. Medical Publishing features one outstanding child advocate each month in the newsletter and on this page. We are currently accepting nominations for March and later, which can be sent to feedback@gwmedical.com.

Please note that self-nominations are not accepted.

The CDs have arrived!

The Child Fatality Review CD-ROMs arrived today, and we are busily packaging them to ship out! They should start showing up in mailboxes later this week, although I couldn't tell you how long, exactly, it will take to get them all out - I also cannot make any promises about delivery dates; I know nothing about these things. All that I can say is that they're here now, and they're leaving as fast as we can manage.

GW Internship

GW is looking for a local university student to fill a for-credit (unpaid) editorial internship. More information is available on our website. Said intern would spend his or her days catering to the whims and whimsies of our managing editor.

That's me, isn't it?

At any rate, we would appreciate it if you could direct interested undergrads to contact me directly @ kerry (at) gwmedical (dot) com.

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In other news, we're in the process of digitizing our titles for electronic distribution. When that process is completed and the books are available through those channels, I will have more information about how and where you will be able to find them.

Child Fatality Review CD

For those of you who have been following our Child Fatality Review CD, I'm happy to tell you that I had a chance to look at the packaging proofs yesterday, and that (to the best of my knowledge) they were approved. This means that the actual disks should start showing up in about 2 weeks.

I do have to apologize; I haven't been here long enough to really follow this product, but I'm aware that we've had some issues in its development, and I'm sure that many of you - meaning our customers - have probably become somewhat frustrated. All that I can say is that we apologize for any inconvenience and that we are as happy as anyone to have this CD finished.

Honoring Child Advocates: A Lifetime of Advocacy

Dr. Padmini of Child Rights Trust

To Dr. R. Padmini, being a child advocate means that she cannot rest until every child has every right they should.

A founder and trustee of India’s Child Rights Trust (CRT) as well as a member of the organization’s planning and programming team, Dr. Padmini could have let slip her role as a child advocate when she retired after 20 years of service with UNICEF. Variously holding positions as a Planning Officer in the South Central Asia Regional Office of UNICEF at Delhi, India, the Programme Planning Officer in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, the UNICEF Representative for Ethiopia, head of the Middle East and North Africa Section at UNICEF, and chief of the Urban and Children in Difficult Circumstances section in UNICEF New York prior to her retirement in 1994, Dr. Padmini’s service has stretched across decades. Her commitment to the rights of children has been unwavering both during this service and after, as she has continued to work with NGOs on behalf of children in India and, in 2002, joined with Anselm Rosario, Director of MYTHRI, and Vasudeva Sharma, then with the Asoka Fellowship, to create the Child Rights Trust. The three now serve as the organization’s trustees.

Dr. Padmini is an inspiration for those around her, a tireless and peerless advocate for children who constantly works to find new and novel ways of spreading information about children’s rights. Dr. Vani Kantli, a colleague of Dr. Padmini’s, stresses that “everyone at the CRT admires Dr. Padmini for her friendly nature and expansive knowledge on the subject of child rights.”

“Being a woman in that age,” he points out, “she was able to struggle and come up with such modern and innovative ideas for the organization every time.” “Even if we only talk with her for 5 minutes, we will learn something,” he points out, adding, “She is not bothered about administrative complexities. She wants her employees to be comfortable with work whether it’s weekdays or weekends.” “She is an open book,” Dr. Kantli stresses, “when it comes to sharing her experiences and her feelings.”

A Career Spanning Decades

Padmini’s work in the area of child development began in 1974, when she joined UNICEF. At that time, she recalls, the drive to enable children's rights was barely an idea in some activists' minds. Prior to joining UNICEF, Dr. Padmini was part of a multi-sectoral team on the Growth Centre Project, a regional planning project, and had earlier worked extensively in survey research. Based upon these experiences, she was selected for the UNICEF Planning post. Once in UNICEF, Padmini quickly realized that this was the kind of work that she wanted to do - her only regret was that she had come into it very late in her working life. Since then, she has become more and more involved in child rights.

Padmini recalls that, when she began working with UNICEF in the 1970s, the issues were different. The emphasis at that time was on basic services for all children, especially those of the poor and of deprived communities. Abuse and other aspects of the protection rights were not focused upon to the extent that they are now. Still, she feels that the key issues are a general lack of awareness of child rights and a traditional view of children that values and loves them as individuals to be nurtured while, at the same time, seeing them as objects subservient to societal norms and family aspirations and meant to be controlled.

These views are complicated, Dr. Padmini believes, by the recent wave of consumerism that has swept through Indian society, especially among the relatively better off, that leads to pushing children into becoming symbols of parental achievement, irrespective of their own desires and aptitudes. Among the poor, on the other hand, the overriding needs of survival lead to a view of children as little more than additional hands to help earn a few more rupees, or, in the case of girls, to be married off as soon as possible in order to reduce the family’s burden.

A New Kind of Advocacy

The Child Rights Trust is dedicated to the education of Indians with respect to the rights and needs of children and to ensuring that all Indians honor the spirit of child rights in their actions, words, and attitudes. When it was founded in 2002, the three trustees felt that, while there were a number of organizations and persons providing services to children in the state of Karnataka and in the country as a whole, there was a serious lack in the public’s understanding of the concepts of child rights and of rights-based programming. Therefore, they decided to focus their attention on advocacy and training to enable their trainees and targets of advocacy to work for and with children using a rights-based approach, thus vastly expanding the reach of the CRT. Dr. Padmini and her colleagues hoped that this strategy would create a multiplier effect; rather than providing direct service to the limited number of children that they could hope to cover as individuals, their intention was to create an expanding net of advocates who would care for far more children. While the CRT’s results have not yet met their expectations, Dr. Padmini is pleased – if not satisfied – with the progress thus far.

Physical Abuse and Neglect: A Training Curriculum

Coming in March is the first in GW Medical Publishing's series of accredited individual learning curricula for nurses and physicians. Physical Abuse and Neglect provides a fairly robust overview of child abuse in 8 chapters which can be submitted for a single certificate or completed individually and accredited in that fashion. The entire curriculum has been awarded 22 credits for both continuing nursing and medical education. A brief overview of the product can be found on our website.

I'm incredibly proud of this book - and not just because it's the first GW title to have my name in it! Physical Abuse and Neglect has some very substantial chapters on things like radiology, fractures, abusive head injuries, bruises and burns, and even chemical poisoning. It also has a chapter on neglect and emotional abuse, which definitely needs to be addressed. The curriculum is based on work by some of the leading authors in the field, and we at G.W. Medical Publishing are very happy to be putting it together.

Also, we've been listening to the input of doctors and nurses who've had an early look at the book, and this has lead to some interesting (for us) design decisions. We don't normally go in for wire bindings on larger books, but we're going to try some spiral business on this book. The idea is that it'll be easier for readers to flip through it and won't keep trying to pop shut. We're also going to put the images and such on a CD, to cut back on the page count for the spiral wire.

San Diego 2008

So, many of you may already know that I made it out to San Diego this year. It was quite the experience, and I'm very glad to have had a chance to do it. I manned the GW booth for a few days, met a lot of authors, and sold a lot of books - all things that I had hoped to have a chance to do. I do wish I could have schmoozed a bit more while I was there (I was equipped with a credit card, people!), but that's just because I could have gone to fancier restaurants.

My love of food is probably going to become a centerpiece of this blog. It almost isn't healthy.

Anyway, some things that were cool: we brought out the Child Fatality Review book for the first time, we trotted out a printer's proof of our new training curriculum, and we got the ball rolling on a new book. It was all very cool, if a bit over my head, at any rate.

I am particularly proud of the curriculum, not just because it has my name in it (it does!), but also because it was generating a very good level of buzz. I was glad that we brought it, and glad that it'll be coming out so soon, because it seems to be something that people need. You can look for it in early March, or you can drop me an email at kerry (at) gwmedical (dot) com. I'll get you the information.

Anyway, it's time for me to get back to what I'm paid for; I hope you all enjoy your day.

Welcome to Our Blog!

Hello, all! It's nice to be writing something a little less formal than our newsletter for a change, and to talk to everyone at once. Now that I've (hopefully) convinced Glenn to let me do a little blogging, you can all look forward to my pointless diversions. I promise to do my best to make you smile, at any rate.