[Karat]

I just graduated with my BSN in December and am starting out working in the MICU. But for the past three years I have been working with autistic children which I absolutely love and have mixed feelings about graduating because I will have less time to spend with these children now that I will have a career. I have always thought about how I could integrate nursing with the needs of autistic children. I thought about becoming a nurse practitioner specializing in holistic caring of autistic children. But I am very curious to see what other nurses are doing in this area of nursing.

If you or someone you know is working as a nurse utilizing nursing skills with autistic children, let me know. I'm interested to see what my options are!

[jkw]

Hi, I am a Registered Nurse with an 8 year old son whom is Autistic. I have found the only "nurse jobs" in which your dealing with developmentally disabled children are those preschools or child care centers that utilize school nurses. They do numerous of things such as provide medications, tube feedings to the children. I live in Kansas City Missouri and found that these positions are rarely available as nurses stay in these positions for a very long time. I am currently enrolled for fall in my local community college to get my degree in child developement in pursuing someday opening my own day care for developementally delayed children.
I hope this helped. Jenna in KC.

[mercyteapot]

I work as the Health Coordinator for an agency that provides families of children with disabilities with parent-to-parent support (other than our clierical staff, we are all parents of kids with disaibilities), resources, referral and training opportunities. I don't work directly with children, but it gives me great pleasure to be able to put parents of these kiddos are the right path in terms of accessing services for their children. I am the mom of a 12 year old son with autism, and he wasn't dxed till age 5.4. I also co-facilitate a dd awareness program for second year residents at our Children's Hospital, during their developmental/behavioral peds rotation, and for nursing students in a number of our area colleges.