Things to improve in school health care

The biggest problem with this scenario is that the inhaler was hard to find. Therefore, the biggest improvement is naturally to make the inhaler easy to find. A simple filing system would do, where each child with medication has their own file in a cabinet. Then, when and if the need arises, all an "office assistant" or any other staff member would need to do is find the name of the student and pull out the appropriate medication, or in this case, inhaler. I understand the policy for not having kids carry around their own medication, but if that's going to be the policy, there has to be a better alternative.

Second, I would strongly advocate for a single school nurse to be assigned to full time duty at each school. However, I don't remember a time when that ever happened in my public school education in WA, so I doubt it will happen, especially when funding is already tight. In this inevitable case, I agree with several previous posters that some simple instructions need to be laid out so that an arguably unnecessary call to 911 can be avoided. There should be an accessible, widely known location where the key to the cabinet (in the improved filing system noted above) is kept, so that all staff members can have quick access to these meds that might be able to save a kid's life. Accompanying each child's medication should be easily understood instructions for administering the medication, in order to make the process as easy and quick as possible.

Lastly, I would encourage a general training day on how to use the most common medications, along with emphasizing the need for quick recognition of common symptoms like asthma attacks. This scenario is highly preventable, and with a bit more careful planning could be mostly avoided if there was a simple, streamlined process for administering the medications that are required to be stored.