倡议书 PROPOSAL
2015年09月29日 20:00  来源： 作者：点击：

Dear colleagues:

We had been very much looking forward to meeting with, listening to and learning from you at the Second International Symposium on the Psychosocial Well-being and Development of Vulnerable Children, Henan University. We anticipated that with researchers and care providers from across the globe and representing many generations, the conference would be informative and exciting. As high as our expectations had been, you great exceeded them!

Not only was each individual presentation of the highest quality, you all masterfully wove in relevant points and perspectives from earlier presentations. As a result, new themes that were “bigger” than those of any one talk emerged. This letter—and final symposium request to you—is in response to one of these themes.

This conference –and the International Collaborative ResearchCenter on the Psychosocial Well-being and Development of Vulnerable Children at Henan University is dedicated to improving the health and well-being of vulnerable children across the globe. We can only help children through actions based on new knowledge. All too often there is a divide between those generating the new knowledge (the “research community”) and those providing the care to the children {“caregivers”). As was discussed at several points, there are many reasons for this divide including different ways of looking at data and evidence and different vocabularies.

In one more small step toward improving the life of vulnerable children everywhere, we ask you to write in lay language a five to six sentence summary of the findings from your research that have some possible immediate implications for improving the health and well-being of vulnerable children now.

It is very important that this be written in terminology that presupposes no training in your field. We will then compile all of the summaries and produce a Symposium Compendium of Information to Improve the Psychosocial Well-being of Vulnerable Children NOW! which we will ask all of our care giver colleagues at the symposium to deliver through their networks and the researchers to share with their colleagues. Further, this compendium will be posted on the new website of the Center on the Psychosocial Well-being and Development of Vulnerable Children (http://rsrq.henu.edu.cn). We plan to update the compendium twice annually. We ask researchers that as you publish  new results, you make the effort to think whether this work could be relevant to improving the health and well-being of children and—if so—send us a five to six sentence summary using the format described above. We ask our caregiver partners to continue to disseminate these relevant findings among their community. We also ask our caregivers to Case Studies in a similar format as to how they are applying any of these new findings in their work. We ask that both caregivers and researchers reach across their cultural divides to determine how they can collaborate in bringing these findings to the children who need them.

In summary, we ask that before October 15 2015 each presenter at the conference send us a five-to six lay summary of his/her presentation structured in this format:

Two-three sentences: Findings that seem directly relevant to improving the health and well-being of children now (e.g., from this work we believe that our intervention approach which is focused on decision-making and communication can reduce the risk of HIV/STD exposure. WE believe that this intervention is much stronger if the adolescents receive this information both in a setting with other adolescents and—very importantly—in a setting with their parents. WE have a curriculum and training materials which we are happy to share with caregivers around the world and are developing a trainer’s website.”)

One sentence: Possible limitations of the evidence that this finding will make a difference (e.g., “there were not a large number of children in this study”; “these children were from one small area and so we do not know if the effects would be the same among children living in different parts of the world”; or, “there were a lot of things being offered to these children and families at the same time, so we cannot be positive that all of the positive outcomes we saw were due to this..”)

One sentence: Describe your next steps, either your next research step or implementation step (e.g., “”we are now going to repeat this trial among more children”; “we are now going to change the intervention by adding a new part that helps doctors and nurses to understand the concerns of patients and caregivers”; or “ we are looking for caregivers who think that this approach may be useful with the children they help to test whether the positive findings we found in our experimental setting will be reproduced in more real-life settings”.

(These examples are only examples; write whatever is appropriate!)

Please send your summaries to: bstanton@med.wayne.edu; xiaoming@mailbox.sc.edu; and jfzhao63@hotmail.comon or before October 15, 2015.
Your further thoughts on the symposium and on this new initiative would be greatly appreciated. Again, thank you for your wonderful work and for the time you devoted to make this symposium such a great success!

We thank you so much for all that you do!

The Symposium Steering Committee:

Guoxiang Zhao, Ph.D. Co-Chair
Bonita Stanton, MD, Co-Chair
Junfeng Zhao, Ph.D., Co-Secretary
Xiaoming Li, Ph.D., Co-Secretary