School Based Health Care System

I think we could do a number of things to provide a better care to the girl in this scenario. Splitting the time between 3 schools by a school nurse, is not an effective way to provide better care to the girl in this case. The school needs to recruit more nurses or nurse aides.

First of all, we could provide better education to the parents of the girl and family, regarding proper asthma management. If the girl had known history of asthma, her parents should have provided her with the inhaler or similar toolkits all the time, especially if she had experienced similar episodic asthma before. But, if it is the first time, the school has responsibilities to provide better care of the girl. It’s unnecessary to call 911 just because the school nurse isn’t available to find the inhaler.

The School Based Health Care Centers or Clinics should be well in placed at school and at least one health care provider should be available. In this case, the problem is the inaccessibility of school nurse in time of need. There can be a number of ways to avoid similar problem like this in the future.

One way to address the issue, is to recruit volunteer nurses or nurse aides to work in part time or to be able to accessible on campus, to cover the school nurse absence; especially when something like this happen. They have to make sure that at least one health care profession is available during school hours.

There also should be health policy that would promote partnership between the school and nearby community health center. By establishing a formal link with nearby community health center, pediatric nurse can be readily available whenever needed or can help coordinate care when the school nurse is not available.

So, health policy makers should advocate the policy that gear towards the establishment of school-based health centers (SBHCs) and integration of SBHCs and community based systems of care, as a way to improve access to health care for all school children in the future.