Schools

Schools Had More Chronically Ill Students In 2010-11

Mountain View schools experienced growth in sick students who needed daily care by school nurses.

The Mountain View Whisman School District (MVWSD) saw more and more students enrolled in school this past year that suffered from chronic illnesses, according to the district’s Head Nurse Sue Barrie.

These children with chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cancer and recent organ transplants–and with serious conditions that required daily care like feeding tubes, catheters, and blood pressure and pulse monitoring–added daily demands on the small staff of nurses that serviced all the schools in the district.

“We’re seeing sicker and sicker kids coming to school,” Barrie said.

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The daily treatment needs of these children often required quite a bit of time, Barrie explained.

“We have one child that needs to be catheterized twice a day. That takes 45 minutes to an hour each time, to go to the site and do the procedure for the child,” Barrie said. “For the diabetic children that need daily injections of insulin, it can take 45 minutes to administer insulin.”

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Barrie explained that several kids have feeding tubes or have severe allergies and sometimes needed their ‘epi’ pens. She added that some children with transplants must be carefully monitored and the list goes on, especially with the children with cancer in the district.

“Because they’re immuno-suppressed, we need to make sure, if they’re exposed to anything, we need to notify the parents so they can notify their doctor right away,” said Barrie.

With the current crisis in education funding in the state, such demands on the small nursing staff at school district might otherwise be too much to handle.

However, with the help the district receives from (ECH), they’ve been able to manage just fine, Barrie added, since two of the three nurses on staff in the MVWSD received grants from ECH.

“With the extra help we get from ECH, we’re able to give these kids the care they need,” Barrie said.

Barbara Avery, who works in the community benefits department at ECH, said the nonprofit hospital tries to help schools in the community every year “in a big way.”

“We do an assessment every three years with other community partners to see what the needs are, as far as our health needs in the community, and then we support partnerships [to help in those areas],” Avery said.

The need for extra school nurses, Avery explained, became very clear to the organization

“We looked at the ratio of students to nurses, and there was one nurse for all the schools in the Mountain View district,” she said. “So we added one nurse at first, and then the next year we added another nurse and extra assistance.”

ECH also helped with regular health.

“Screenings are mandated every year for vision, hearing and so forth,” Avery said, who added that the nurses must also follow-up with families to ensure the child get the glasses or hearing aids they need. “That can be hard, for one nurse to do all these screenings.”

ECH also gave the district valuable help with chronic disease management for the students who needed it.

According to Avery, ECH uses data to help identify the needs of these students. For example, if they noticed that a child had an excessive number of absences due to health reasons, ECH will help the district contact the child’s family and determine what kind of help can be given to help manage the student’s condition while staying in school—be it daily injections or other treatments, extra monitoring, or anything else.

“The nurse can help develop a plan with the family,” said Avery. “Such as, do they have care? Do they have insurance? If they have an inhaler, do they know how to use it? How can we help reduce the triggers to the asthma?”

Avery said, this kind of assistance is a major goal of ECH’s, to help keep children in school.

“If children are not feeling well, even if they are at school, they’re not learning,” she said.

ECH also helps with programs for the daily wellness of children, including physical education programs on site at the schools, access to immunizations, and counseling services for students’ social and emotional health.

For Barrie, ECH’s help has been invaluable.

“It’s been a very positive interaction, with us and ECH,” Barrie said.

Do you think there should be more nurses in the schools? What has your experience been with a sick child at school?


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