Friday, June 6, 2014
Many new laws created by the Indiana General Assembly take effect on July 1 of this year. This includes several initiatives to assist children with special needs and their families.
Oftentimes, these children require particular accommodations or support outside of their homes. Here is a quick summary of some new laws that will help address their needs:
Senate Enrolled Act 245: Many people discover they have allergies in their childhood. These conditions sometimes require life-saving devices like EpiPens to treat severe reactions. However, when these reactions happen for the first time at school, nurse’s offices might be unprepared to address the situation.
To help schools better care for students with serious allergies, this new law offers better access to devices like EpiPens. It allows health-care providers to prescribe them to schools or school districts, letting designated school personnel fill, store and administer the devices to students. This is crucial to ensuring students with allergies are safe both at home and at school.
Senate Enrolled Act 397: For children with certain disabilities, the cost of a wheelchair can be overwhelming. Specialized wheelchairs can be even more expensive. This new law helps offset some of that expense by reimbursing Indiana’s children’s nursing home facilities that purchase custom wheelchairs for children with severe developmental disabilities.
These facilities often make numerous reimbursement claims for residents’ wheelchairs, but some claims may be denied if there is a lack of federal or state funding. SEA 397 ensures that more claims will be approved, so that children with disabilities can receive the custom wheelchairs they need.
Senate Enrolled Act 408: This law, which has already taken effect, helps prevent newborns from experiencing developmental disabilities that can result from a mother’s substance addiction. This condition is also known as “neonatal abstinence syndrome” (NAS).
SEA 408 requires the Indiana State Department of Health (ISDH) to work with field experts to develop best practices for identifying and reporting NAS. After the study concludes, ISDH will develop and establish pilot programs with certain hospitals to implement effective models for NAS identification, data collection and reporting. This is an important step to protecting the health of mothers and infants both before and after the child’s birth.
These are just a few of the new laws that were passed during the 2014 legislative session. To see a full summary of new laws, click here.
