


Feeding Tube Awareness Week: Success Stories from Dr. Kathryn Peterson
“The Dalai Lama noted that, “Genuine compassion is based on a clear acceptance or recognition that others, like oneself, want happiness and have the right to overcome suffering.”
Children have the right to overcome suffering–particularly when they are missing critical nutrients and sufficient calories–in a manner that leads to efficient and robust outcomes. … As the caregiver herself noted, delays to these obtained effects might have led to “an unknown amount of traumatic NG insertions, ER visits, hospital admissions, infections, surgeries, etc.”
“I’ve seen the feeding team work their magic to rid children of scurvy, avoid or remove feeding tubes, reduce failure-to-thrive, and decrease hospital admissions. To me, this is the epitome of being compassionate providers who mitigate the risk of trauma through effective intervention.”

New article: Social Validity of Paediatric Feeding Treatment across Goals, Processes, and Outcomes
Surprisingly, despite its importance and attention given in discussion currently in our field, supporting data and research are very much lacking. Data are needed in paediatric feeding to help accurately disseminate this highly important, effective, acceptable, and valued treatment, increasing access to treatment for families in need to improve their quality of life, and increasing opportunities for training/education for professionals. This is the first report to our knowledge to analyse social validity data comprehensively across variables such as participant characteristics, goals, treatment processes, treatment components, and outcomes. Ratings were high across the board (4.8 & 4.9 out of 5). Check out the results/graphs/tables! Future research could get caregiver input to design assessments, and use methods to analyse open-ended data (as in Anderson et al., 2021), in addition to the extensions to this work in Taylor & Taylor 2022b.

New full text article: Social Validity of Pediatric Feeding Treatment Components Across Time
Free editable surveys to use! Check out the supplementary docs for this article (scroll to the bottom at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bin.1879). These could be used by both practitioners and researchers, and adapted for any area of ABA, not just feeding. Lots of clinical utility and future directions for further research.
ausEE Feeding Tube Awareness Week Virtual Education Program Quote
