Dana (She/Her/Hers) joined the iCarol team in 2013 after 12 years of direct service and administrative duties at a blended 2-1-1/crisis intervention/suicide prevention center. As the Communications and Social Media Manager at iCarol, you'll find her presenting Webinars, Tweeting, Blogging, Facebooking, and producing other materials that aid helplines in their work.
iCarol is currently seeking a candidate to fill the role of Solutions Expert on our Business Development Team! This is a remote work position open to anyone in the United States or Canada.
We are looking for someone who is a self-starter, charismatic, and highly motivated to hunt for, identify, qualify, and closing high quality business opportunities. An ideal candidate will have an understanding, passion, or experience working with not-for-profits, and experience using iCarol Software.
To read the full job description and apply, please visit our Careers Page.
In recent years iCarol has welcomed several new customers who are Child Care Resource and Referral agencies. These agencies curate a comprehensive database of child care providers in their state, province, or region. This includes all sorts of information that parents and caregivers need when researching their options and making decisions — hours of operation, current openings, languages spoken, pre-school or educational programs offered, voucher acceptance, locations, and much more.
Child Care Resource and Referral agencies using iCarol have found that iCarol’s resource database offers the ultimate flexibility for their needs. Further, iCarol helps them document and track their interactions with parents, caregivers, and others who are inquiring about available care in their community. iCarol is also helping them send child care referrals by Email and SMS/Text, allowing them to accept online inquiries using Public Web Forms, and keep their listings updated while using less staff resources to do so with Automated Resource Verification.
If you’re going to the conference, please stop by and visit Veronica at our booth, which will be located at the entrance to the exhibition and registration area. We have lots of great information to provide, and you can also download our new eBook. We’re excited to see you in Arlington!
We’ve just added a new resource you may be interested in! Click the image below to download our newest eBook: Choosing Software for Child Care Resource and Referral Agencies.
This resource is designed to help program directors and other leaders at Child Care Resource and Referral agencies wevaluate their needs for software to help them in their work connecting parents and caregivers with the best child care providers to meet their needs. We’ve even included a checklist that helps them see if the software they’re currently using or considering meets these needs.
May is Mental Health Month, and organizations around the world are sharing information about how to obtain and maintain good mental health.
Each year since 1949, Mental Health America and their affiliates have led observance of Mental Health Month. This includes release of an annual Mental Health Month toolkit, which you can download here. They also have a number of resources available on their Mental Health Month web page, this year focusing on “Look Around, Look Within – from your neighborhood to genetics, many factors come into play when it comes to your mental health.”
In the toolkit, MHA places a focus on Social Determinants of Health — how many aspects of one’s life can affect their health, including mental health, that aren’t related to their genetic makeup. This can include things like:
Your community – if your community experiences higher rates of violence, gentrification, pollution and poor air quality, underfunded schools, or a lack of access to resources, this can effect the mental health of those living in that community.
Housing – something as simple as having a safe and stable home, and housing, is key to one’s mental health.
The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) is focusing on the theme of More Than Enough — celebrating the inherent value of all people regardless of any mental health diagnosis, socioeconomic status, background, or ability.
The Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA) has a number of articles and resources available in recognition of Canada’s Mental Health Week (May 1-7) which are available here. Every May for the last 71 years, Canadians in communities, schools, workplaces and the House of Commons have rallied around CMHA Mental Health Week. This year’s theme is My Story. CMHA states:
Storytelling is a fundamental part of being human. Stories help build connections and strong communities. Storytelling, in all its forms, supports mental health and reduces stigma.
We hope during this Mental Health Month, our blog readers will take the time to engage with these and other mental health leaders to learn more and promote better mental health for all people.
According to a recent article in the Denver Post, not all pandemic-related problems have eased. COVID-19 underlined many inequities and weaknesses in our system, and those involving the child care industry still persist. The price and availability of child care continue to create strains for families across the country. Parents are often placed on waiting lists, for example in Colorado there are about 75,000 more children under 6 whose parents are working than there are licensed day care spots, according to the Bell Policy Center.
Even with increased awareness and understanding about mental health and mental illness, mental health care, particularly psychiatric care, can still be difficult to access. This often leaves Primary Care Physicians (PCPs), nurses, and other healthcare workers on the frontlines of mental health care in the United States.
However, in Utah PCPs can access specialized psychiatric consultations through the Consultation Access Link Line to Utah Psychiatry (CALL-UP) Program. This legislative funded program is designed to address the limited number of psychiatric services in Utah and improve access to them, and serves patients at no cost to providers or patients in the state of Utah.
iCarol is proud to play a role in the service delivery of CALL-UP, through CALL-UP’s use of iCarol for psychiatrist on-call shift sign up, CALL-UP program documentation to maintain state funding, and through iCarol’s Public Web Forms.
Here’s how iCarol fits into the service delivery workflow of the CALL-UP program in Utah:
The on-call service for psychiatry consultation is available Monday through Friday from 12:00pm to 4:30 pm. Participating psychiatrists are invited by the CALL-UP program administrators to sign into the iCarol system to sign up for shifts where they will be on-call for consultations.
Primary Care Physicians (PCPs) are instructed to contact the CALL-UP program to request a consultation. If the PCP calls in, CALL-UP staff collect basic demographic, needs, and other important data from the PCP in order to comply with state funding requirements, which is input by the phone specialist into iCarol, using an iCarol Contact Form. Then, they can forward the call to the on-call psychiatrist for the consultation to occur.
PCPs can also request a consultation online, using an iCarol Public Web Form. The form has a built-in screening element that first ensures the requestor is a physician, as this is a requirement for program access. If they are not a physician, a prompt instructs them to please contact their doctor.
If the requestor is a PCP then they continue to use the form to provide the information needed to obtain a consultation, including the demographic and other information required to maintain state funding.
Once the Public Web Form is received by CALL-UP staff, they have the information they need to contact the PCP requesting consultation, and connect them with the on-call psychiatrist. Because the iCarol Web Form is simply a publicly available iCarol Contact Form, they already have the data they need, automatically submitted to iCarol with the form, to meet their reporting requirements.
For more information about Utah’s CALL-UP Program, visit their website.
Want to learn more about Public Web Forms and talk through how they might be used for your program or partnership?
The following is being shared from the United States Office for Victims of Crime.
OVC anticipates making up to 2 awards of up to $2 million each for up to a 36-month period of performance, to begin on October 1, 2023.
This program seeks to enhance or expand the capacity of national hotlines that are essential for providing crisis intervention services, safety planning, information, referrals, and resources for victims of crime.
It also supports participation in the National Hotline Consortium, a group of leading national victim service and crisis intervention hotlines that share technology service delivery and promising practices to provide high-quality support for victims and survivors.
During a Pre-Application webinar, OVC staff will review solicitation requirements and conduct a question and answer session with interested potential applicants. Participation in the webinar is optional, but strongly encouraged.
The Pre-Application Webinar is scheduled for:
Date: Friday, March 24, 2023
Time: 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m., eastern time
Anytime you’re working in an online application, data security should be top-of-mind. This is a wide-ranging topic, starting with the passwords you use to access the system, creating policies on data retention and safe disposal, user account access, safe sharing, and so much more.
For our March Support Training, we invite customers to join us for a discussion around Security Best Practices in iCarol. We’ll touch on a variety of tools available for you to use to put your own policies and practices around data security into place at your organization.
Date: Wednesday, March 15
Time: 2pm Eastern
To register for this webinar, log into iCarol — the link to register is posted in the iCarol Help Center Community Announcements as well as the Admin Dashboard.
Whether you trialed Automated Follow-ups or not, we want to hear from you!
As you may have heard, iCarol recently wrapped up a trial of a new Automated Follow-ups Feature.
In order to learn from this experience and plan for future feature releases and trials, we are requesting customer feedback in the form of a survey.
We are encouraging all iCarol customers to take the survey, even if you did not know about Automated Follow-ups or if you did not participate in the trial. The survey takes less than 1 minute to complete – log in to iCarol and navigate to our Help Center or Admin Dashboard for the link to the survey!
When it comes to teens dating, many parents and guardians worry about things like their teen’s emotions or heartbreak, staying out too late, losing focus and falling behind at school, sexual activity, STDs, or teen pregnancy. And while all of those are worthy of concern for a caring parent, many do not stop to consider another big issue facing teens: Teen Dating Violence.
According to information provided by loveisrespect.org, a survey found that 81% of parents believe teen dating violence is not an issue or admit they don’t know if it’s an issue. And though 82% of parents feel confident that they could recognize the signs if their child was experiencing dating abuse, a majority of parents (58%) could not correctly identify all the warning signs of abuse.
This is troubling considering the problem of abusive romantic relationships between teens problem is a prevalent issue.
1 in 3 high school students experience physical or sexual violence, or both, by someone they are dating
10% of adolescents report being the victim of physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner during the previous year
Girls and young women between the ages of 16 and 24 experience the highest rate of intimate partner violence — almost triple the national (US) average
Among female victims of intimate partner violence, 94% of those age 16-19 and 70% of those age 20-24 were victimized by a current or former boyfriend or girlfriend
Violent behavior typically begins between the ages of 12 and 18
To learn more about Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month, visit:
