Transforming Pediatrics for Early Childhood: Elevating Family Engagement, Leadership, and Storytelling in Clinical Practice
This toolkit brings together practical strategies and resources to help pediatric care teams foster authentic partnerships with families. The sections of the toolkit are organized by the steps a clinic might take in its efforts to strengthen family engagement, leadership, and storytelling. Toolkit sections include:
Section 1: Complete a Baseline Assessment of Family Engagement
Resources in this section focus on understanding your clinic’s readiness to engage families and current practices – the first step toward building strong, meaningful family partnerships. The resources are designed to help teams reflect together, identify strengths and gaps, and set a foundation for improvement.
This guide helps teams review their current readiness to engage families across four levels: baseline, questioning, interested, and invested. Checklists in the guide can be used to start discussions on how to strengthen engagement. An online version of this tool is available here.
The FESAT is a structured assessment that measures how family engagement is integrated into system-level initiatives. Staff and family leaders can complete the assessment together and use the results to identify strengths and opportunities to grow family engagement practices.
Section 2: Develop Infrastructure to Support Family Engagement and Leadership
Once a pediatric clinic understands its readiness, the next step is to build structures that enable consistent and meaningful family engagement. Resources in this section help teams define roles, create policies, and prepare an environment where family leaders can participate as true partners.
This guide can help teams write clear role descriptions for family leaders serving on advisory groups, projects, or committees. It includes sections for the family leader’s purpose, expected responsibilities, skills, compensation, and more.
Teams can also use this checklist to ensure all important elements are included in a family leader role description, including purpose, expectations, skills, time commitment, supports, and payment.
This guide is designed to help create a written policy that embeds family engagement practices into an organization’s core work. By following this guide, pediatric teams can develop a policy that covers definitions, staff and family roles, training, engagement processes, supports, and evaluation.
Pediatric staff and family leaders can use this messaging example to help communicate the importance of family engagement to decision-makers and leadership. The sample messages and structured work plan can be used to prepare presentations, proposals, or pitches.
This checklist helps ensure written materials, policies, and communications are easy to understand, well-organized, accessible, and family-friendly.
Section 3: Select Family Leaders
The resource in this section helps pediatric teams recruit and select family leaders who are a good fit for specific roles.
Teams can use this planning tool to identify current and potential partners, including families and organizations, to inform the recruitment and selection of family leaders.
Section 4: Engage Family Leaders
Successful partnerships begin with a thoughtful onboarding process. Resources in this section guide pediatric teams in welcoming new family leaders, providing orientation, and setting family leaders up for success.
This step-by-step guide is designed to orient family leaders to a new project or initiative. It includes sections to introduce the project, clarify expectations, review communication approaches, and outline available supports during the onboarding phase.
Family leaders can complete this self-assessment to reflect on their skills and opportunities for growth. The inventory can be used during or after the onboarding process to identify strengths, tailor development areas, and plan for mentorship training.
Section 5: Elevate Family Storytelling
Storytelling is a valuable and engaging way to share families’ experiences, perspectives, and expertise. Resources in this section help family leaders and pediatric teams prepare and tell stories that follow principles of respect, collaboration, transparency, and sustainability. Before an effort begins, pediatric teams should consider what family partners need to support storytelling and plan ahead to ensure they feel comfortable.
This guide outlines how to plan and execute storytelling that centers families. It covers building trust, setting clear expectations, protecting privacy, ensuring consent, and compensating storytellers. The guide also encourages maintaining relationships with storytellers after stories are shared.
Family leaders can use this guide to prepare their story, including identifying its purpose, audience, core message, and structure.
This editable template helps family leaders organize and share their stories. It includes guiding questions, directions for submitting photos and consent forms, details on how the story will be reviewed and published, and placeholders for writing their story.
Teams can use this editable consent form when collecting family stories. The form should be customized to match the needs and aims of a team’s program and its family partners.
