What is Respite Care?
Friday NITE Friends provides an invaluable service to families with medically fragile and special needs children. The program’s mission is to provide medically supervised childcare to the parents of these special children. Parents entrust their children to our care on Friday evenings from 6-10 p.m. so they may have a ‘respite’ from the almost continuous job of taking care of their child.
Medical Room
Our highest level of care for children birth to 15 years old who are medically fragile and/or require on-going treatment. This would include children with feeding tubes, apnea monitors, severe asthma, immune system dysfunction, etc.
This room is staffed by several Registered Nurses or vocational Nurses, as well as volunteers. We can serve a maximum of 6 children in this setting. Admission to the program is by application based on need. Currently each family can utilize the program twice per month.
Special Care Rooms
This is our service for special needs children: Autism, Down Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy ,etc. These children are in 5 rooms; one for ages birth to two, three and fours, five and six year olds, and seven plus. Each room is staffed by a Supervising Adult and 3-4 adult and/or teen volunteers. Special care families can use the program once every four weeks.
Sibling Care
We also provide care for the sibling of our special need children. This is basically a sitter service. Siblings 7 to 12 years old play in a large recreation or watch movies or play games in the sibling room. 4-6 adult and/or teen volunteers supervise sibling care. Siblings under 7 years old are, are included in the age appropriate special care room.
