The FAMCare Blog

THE EPIDEMIC

The silent scourge of opioid addiction began to secretly infest America’s small suburban towns almost a decade ago. The wanton prescribing of opioid pain medication, like OxyContin, by American doctors claimed more innocent victims to heroin addiction than the entire army of illegal drug dealers. Suburban housewives, school teachers, firemen, and ministers replaced inner-city teenagers as victims. The legitimate medical profession, critical of its own previous performance in pain management, prescribed vast amounts of opioid derivatives and ended up addicting entire towns to heroin. No one seemed to notice or wanted to admit it. Gradually, however, as the poison that legitimate doctors injected into the veins of unsuspecting fathers, mothers, sons and daughters began to have its pernicious effect, heroin addiction was recognized by local and federal health officials as an epidemic that had silently infected our entire society.

As you go through your year, you work hard, put in the hours, and focus on doing the best job possible, all while serving your customers. But in all you do, day in and day out, do you take the time to acknowledge your customers and the people who support you and your organization — do you let them know how much you appreciate them?

The election is over and there are obviously mixed feelings across the board ranging from excitement about the future, devastation about the loss, to just a general level of uncertainty. We talked recently about how social workers can approach their clients during this uncertain time whether they are republicans, democrats, or undecideds. Staying impartial is critical and using the current situation to their advantage are keys to tackling the challenges we are seeing with helping clients. Social workers are able to dig deeper into underlying concerns, mental state, and the real needs of their clients, but what about social workers themselves?

Not only do we need to understand the effect politics has on the people social workers serve but we need to understand what affect is has on those providing these services. Everyone will handle this transition of power from President Obama to President Elect trump differently but the mission remains the same! There are still children and families in this country that need their help.

No matter what side of the political fence you fall on your clients are counting on you to show up! Unfortunately, you don’t get a day off from all the terrible things happening every day in our country to our most vulnerable population, children. That is a luxury not afforded to this field of work. No matter who the Commander in Chief is we still need you to show up and work towards improving our client’s lives and protecting children. Thanks for showing up when times are tough!

Good morning - this post comes to us from our friends at Move Mondays.  I have posted the article here in it's entirety.

The world of Social Services is populated with “givers”. No sensible person seeks fame or fortune in social work, so every year at this time we give thanks for our colleagues who became social workers because of an inner impulse to help the less fortunate.

This Thanksgiving we would like to recognize, and especially thank, one very special group of these “givers” - the over 62 MILLION VOLUNTEERS who provide indispensable support for both community based and nonprofit social services across the entire country.

Check out this short video on how using the third party software tool - Tableau can enhance your data reporting and analysis efforts.  It's simple, clean and powerful with many graphing options at your disposal.

Analytics That Will Help Your Agency Visualize Data to Make Data Driven Decisions

FAMCare and Tableau can give your company a competitive edge.  Data is a powerful tool that can provide insights to help solve key questions for your business.  Leveraging data can turn acumens into action steps that improve your business process. Using data to influence positive change is something that impacts global powerhouses and mom and pop stores. Using data to make decisions about your business is called strategic decision making. 

Financial measurements are sufficient and appropriate in the for-profit corporate world, but strict financial measurements rarely reveal the strategic performance of the typical nonprofit. Financial performance measurement systems in the nonprofit world usually focus only on the measurement of donations, expenditures, and operating expense ratios. Success for nonprofits, however, should be measured by how effectively they meet the needs of their constituencies.

There was a blond lady who boarded an airplane and took a seat in first class.  However, she only had a coach class ticket.  The stewardess came to her and informed the blond that she had to move back to coach class.  To this the blond responded “I’m blond, I’m beautiful and I am going to California.”  Taken aback the stewardess got the head steward to talk to the blond woman.  When the steward informed her she had to move the response was the same, “I’m blond, I’m beautiful and I am going to California.”  The steward got the co-pilot who talked to the woman and the same response was given, I’m blond, I’m beautiful and I am going to California.”  Finally they went to get the pilot to talk to the blond. 

Congratulations to our recent graduates of the FAMCare / Visions Server Master Certification training course!  Thank you to Patrick Skelly of Randolph County North Carolina Dept of Social Services, Justin Chirco of Promesa Behavioral Health in California and Marc Dietrich of Wolverine Human Services in Michigan for attending the course!

My name is Heather Lytle and I work for a non-profit family organization called F.A.C.T.   F.A.C.T. staff work to support families that include a person with a disability.  We are an organization that hires parents and guardians of people with disabilities who then in turn support other parents and guardians using a peer mentor approach. 

Every Day - 20 U.S. Veterans Commit Suicide

In 2014, the latest year statistics are available, 7,400 veterans took their own lives.

A new video was posted this morning from our friends at Movie Mondays. 

Yesterday, we launched our first overview video of OData.

Today - we're proud to announce the second video is complete and shows a more in depth analysis of just how powerful this combination tool really is.  You can check it out below.

Today we're announcing the launch of our newest addition to the FAMCare reporting suite.  We are promoting a new secure way to run, manipulate and CUT your FAMCare data using EXCEL.