When exactly did schools become rubbish at medical stuff?
Got a phone call the other day from our childrens’ primary school. “It’s [child2],” they said. “We’re a bit worried about his elbow.”
How exactly is one meant to react to a call like this? Say “Oh my GOD his ELBOW I’m coming down there AT ONCE!”? I suspect that was how they wanted me to react. I rather didn’t.
“What do you mean, worried?” I said.
“Well, he’s been carrying it oddly - he fell over and he says it hurts.”
OK, so we’re now getting slightly somewhere. Let us begin to take a medical history, but unlike in ER where they ask the patient face-to-face, I’m doing it over the phone to someone who isn’t the patient. Ho hum, sure this happens to GPs all the time.
“So is it swollen? Is it red?” I ask.
“Er, no,” comes the reply.
“Does it hurt him to move it?”
Pause. Off-phone, I hear her ask if it hurts to move it, and he says - he’s clearly in the office - yes. Which you would expect, to be honest, from any child.
Thinking that at least this is going to be a lot simpler than House, we move on. He can move it, so it’s probably not broken. Or at least not seriously. Let’s move on to other possibilities..
“If you squeeze his elbow and he moves it, does it hurt him?” More noise off-phone. Comes back. “He says yes.”
“Fine,” I say. We have a diagnosis.
“Well, he can’t have chipped the bone,” I say. “If he had, he’d be screaming in pain when you did that. I think he’s just banged it. It’ll get better.”
“Oh,” they say, as though I’ve told them something incredible.
When exactly was it that schools became completely bobbins at telling whether a child has a broken leg or just a flea bite? Why can’t they actually do anything? Why is it that they’re in loco parentis, yet won’t do the obvious things that any parent would do - ask questions that would find out whether any “injury” is the real thing, or what. Schools these days not only don’t seem to have a nurse (at least the primaries), but don’t have a clue about how to tell whether someone’s properly ill or injured or not.
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July 15th, 2007 at 12:33 am
Cos schools these days are staffed by teachers from my generation (I’m 26). We don’t know this stuff. No-one taught it to us. And nowadays, we’re more scared of getting sued if Little Jimmy really has broken an arm.
You’d hope the old guard of teachers would pass on the knowledge, but I think they got tired of the ridiculous paperwork and left.
July 15th, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Since parents started threatening schools with legal action for not acting in the best interests of the child, or perhaps more accurately the best interests of the parent. Loco parentis may describe the legal relationship between a school and a child and its parents or careers, but the reality is very different. Complaints from parents about discipline, relationships with other children and health care are commonplace. Talk to the head, or one of the Governors of your child’s school - you’ll be surprised.
July 15th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
But surely parents have been complaining forever. What’s changed? Precisely when did it change - was there some law change which meant that teachers couldn’t do trivial medical things?
July 16th, 2007 at 1:11 pm
I blame the blame culture. The school staff have to demonstrate that they’ve kept you informed (which is why you probably had to sign an accident book), but they are - or at least believe themselves to be - prevented from taking any action. At my kids’ school, staff are allowed to put a sticking plaster over a splinter, but not to remove the splinter. Madness.
July 16th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
I blame the blame culture. The school staff have to demonstrate that they’ve kept you informed (which is why you probably had to sign an accident book), but they are - or at least believe themselves to be - prevented from taking any action. At my kids’ school, staff are allowed to put a sticking plaster over a splinter, but not to remove the splinter. Madness. “We’re not insured” they told me when I queried this.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Better than that are the Secondary schools that insist on sending ill pupils home!
My son was pulling a ‘fast one’ one morning. He was doing his full “dying swan” performance and I was studiously ignoring it!
He had a headache, he was feeling sick, he had a sore body part etc.
I dropped him off at the school gates (rather than trust him to use the bus) and told him to get a drink of water in case he was dehydrated.
I then went into work and had a meeting.
I got back to my desk an hour later to find 10 missed calls on my mobile phone.
4 were “witheld” numbers (which were from the school), 3 from my son’s mobile and 3 from my (elderly & semi-housebound) parents.
My son had gone into school and had repeated his complaints to his form tutor at Registration. He had been immediately despatched to the medical room, which is staffed by the school receptionists - not trained medical personnel.
The trigger words were “I feel sick!”. In order to avoid vomit, the staff had tried to contact me, left voicemail messages, and then had accessed the list of emergency numbers trying my husband’s details (he was in Dublin, so heaven knows how much the calls cost) and then my parents’ number.
The upshot was that my parents struggled into their car, collected my son, who turned from a wan patient into a triumphal grandson.
Even my parents were shocked at how much of their larder he’d consumed by the time I had arranged to get the rest of the day off work and come and collect him - all of their ice-cream, fish fingers & chips and almost a whole biscuit tin!
I gave him a fairly stern “talking to” about abusing the system.
One week later, I was working from home. I was telephoned at 09:30 to say that the same child was suffering from a headache.
I explained that he was not ill, just tired from football training the night before and a rapid growth spurt. I asked if they’d given him water to drink, and they seemed surprised that I should want them to administer “fluids” in case he needed to go to Casualty. I am afraid that I was less than sympathetic and refused to collect him.
15 minutes later I had a call from my mother. My father had just left his home to go and fetch my son from school.
I had to stop work, drive to my parents’ house, collect the son who was already mysteriously recovered enough to re-tune his Grandad’s car radio, bundle said child back into my car and take him back to the school secretaries. I insisted that he wasn’t ill, and that they delete my parents’ contact details from their records.
I wasted almost 2 hours, and a good deal of petrol.
My son has had no lasting effects - having lived to take A levels since.
I wouldn’t mind, but as parents we are expected to have checked that their coursework has been correctly filed, by the non-communicated deadline; we are expected to psychically know that the kids are given letters to bring home & to search their bags that night to sign and return the reply slip, but we aren’t supposed to know that our offspring are pulling a sickie!
Whatever happened to common sense?
July 18th, 2007 at 8:19 am
An interesting counterbalance to all this, in theory at least, comes as the Disability Discrimination Act has its effect on schools. Many disabled children need access to medical treatment during the day. They are entitled under the Act to the same education services as anyone else. Schools must make reasonable adjustments.
The excellent people at the Council for Disabled Children were (at least last time I spoke to them) very determined that children with complex health needs could and should be accommodated in schools.
The CDC’s webpages give links to useful publications, including one to the government’s guidance to schools on managing medicines in schools and early years.
http://www.ncb.org.uk/Page.asp?originx1396eu_65833101337621u86z1550075641
Guidance for school staff on, say, adminstering rectal valium to a child who has gone into prolonged seizure is a refreshingly long way from this discussion. It’s a cheering thought that there are some enlightened schools, using common sense and practical worked-out policies.
PJ
July 21st, 2007 at 1:08 pm
The difference in schools can be amazing. My best friend’s son is sent home regularly after complaining of “feeling poorly” and pulling his face a bit, while I turn up at 3.25 to a crying daughter and an accident report that says: “hit her head on playground” after collision with another child. The same school that sends my friend’s son home has also rang and said: “He won’t eat his sandwiches, he says he doesn’t like tuna. He only has an apple, a cheese string and a drink as well as that, please can you put more in tomorrow.” The boy has been eating tuna for years! The phrase “pull yourself together!” or “Come on, eat up” must be sadly outmoded now. God I sound like an old grump.