We felt it would be important to explain how we came to this decision. The term “Technology Dependent Children” was created over 20 years ago to medically describe and categorize children with special health care needs. This term was meant to simplify the difficult overall description of the hundreds and thousands of rare diseases, illness and accident-related medical conditions. At the time it was easier to use this term to help describe the children.
When we first chose to use this term for the name of our non-profit agency, we felt it would become well recognized in the community. Unfortunately, the use of this term was reduced by both our federal and state governments. By the time our first Angela´s House opened in 2000, we saw how well received it was and we also saw that people in the community knew us more from Angela´s House than from ATDC. We decided at that point to use both names to describe ATDC for our home care services and Angela´s House for our home-away-from-home alternative for children. Over the past seven years, the term “Technology Dependent Children” was not used and Angela´s House became more familiar to people.
The decision was made to change our name to Angela´s House. All of our services will remain the same. We will continue to support parents caring for their children at home and we will continue to offer out-of-home alternatives for children that can no longer live with their parents. We understand that we are still faced with the enormity of trying to explain to our community which children we work with. Our best description is to say we work with children with special health care needs that are medically fragile, chronically ill or living with a life threatening illness.
