Caring for Our Children: National Health and Safety Performance Standards for Out-of--Home Child Care Programs, 2nd Edition was released by the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Public Health Association and the National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care (NRC) in January 2002. The full edition of
Caring for Our Children, 2nd Ed. contains 707 standards and recommendations on all aspects on the health and safety of children in child care settings. These standards were developed by leading health and safety experts over a period of four years. Each standard includes rationale behind the need for such practices. The full edition is available on the NRC web site at
http://nrckids.org/CFOC/index.html. Print copies can be purchased from the American Academy of Pediatrics (www.aap.org) and the American Public Health Association (www.apha.org).
In an effort to make select subject areas more accessible to intended users, the NRC is developing smaller documents on specific subject areas. This document is a compilation of the standards related to exclusion and inclusion criteria for ill children in child care settings and those standards related to the caring of ill children.
The intended audiences for this document are:
child care providers faced with the daily decisions on when is a child too sick to be in their care and those providers who provide care for ill children,
health consultants and trainers who can promote and teach these criteria to child care providers,
parents who want to be informed on when it is appropriate for their ill child to be in child care and when it is not, and
state policy makers who are looking for guidance in setting state rules on these issues.
Since the publication of
Caring for Our Children, 2nd Ed., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has addressed the issue of hand hygiene in health care facilities with an extensive review of the literature and a set of recommendations for health care settings. See
Hand Hygiene Guidelines Fact Sheet (http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/fs021025.htm). A clarification of the application of this information to the child care setting is detailed in the article
2002 Update on Hand Hygiene in Child (Day) Care found on the ChildCare Information Exchange website (http://mail.ccie.com/library/5015058.pdf).
We would like to give special thanks to Susan Aronson, MD, FAAP and Phyllis Stubbs-Wynn, MD, MPH for reviewing this compilation of exclusion/inclusion standards. We would also like to thank all those individuals who contributed to
Caring For Our Children, 2nd Ed. A listing can be viewed at:
http://nrckids.org/CFOC/PDFVersion/Acknowledgments.pdf
For questions or assistance on these standards or
Caring for Our Children, 2nd Ed., please contact:
National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care
