Because we need the return of the school doctor
Alessandra Servidori's post
There are 8.5 million students, of which 7.6 million attend the state school and the remainder the equal school. So who thinks of them, our children and students, especially in times of a pandemic destined to recur?
The serious epidemic condition that we have been experiencing for months now, linked to Sars-Cov 2, is pushing, even if always late, to rethink care and health care roles and models.
Once there was the school doctor, he was a pediatrician who took care of periodically visiting all the students at school. In these particular and unique situations she would have been an indispensable figure. It should be restored and was already reorganized, despite all the difficulties of the case. It was talked about in September 2020 but nothing was done.
To think that the Order of Doctors, the National Federation of GPs, was and still is firmly convinced that this is the choice to make. The safety in the school and the attendance of Italian children and young people and the organization only very partially concerns the general practitioner because the confusing guidelines defined provide that teachers and all staff are called by the Health Protection Agencies who then delegates the Territorial Social Health Authorities and Covid centers to carry out serological tests.
A situation of uncertainty that affects the whole of society, generating understandable concerns. It was initially thought that the serological tests were carried out by the general practitioner and therefore a solution that would perhaps have favored the adhesion by the school staff. Then we moved from the Healthcare Centers now we have returned to thinking about the general practitioner, correcting the National Collective Labor Agreement for doctors, replenishing the conventions and putting in the previous budget law a 200 million for equipment and in that budget law that is is preparing now there is no trace.
Perhaps it is said that you are thinking of investing with the resources of the Recovery Fund but you don't know. The well of San Patrizio.
It is certainly wrong to crowd the clinics in this period in which there is a frenzied recovery of the virus, even with the lowering of the average age. The tests must be carried out by people with the necessary protections and still few are masks, gloves, shoes, gowns, disinfectants. GPs have their business with flu vaccinations – a vaccine that has become even more important this year due to coronavirus circulation and the pneumococcal vaccine against pneumonia, but both vaccines are not found, they do not arrive – and people frightened by the pandemic flock to clinics.
It is certain that the general practitioner has an active surveillance role but he must be a superman to intervene in the case of new positive patients by activating the procedures quickly and today virtually every school should have its own competent doctor, but he deals only with the staff working in the school, not pupils.
Restoring the "school doctor" is a fundamental need, set aside with an evident irresponsibility that leads us to parental panic, given that children and adolescents are admittedly potential infectors.
And to say that the Coordinator of the Technical Scientific Committee for the Coronavirus emergency had proposed, on behalf of the whole Committee, the restoration of the figure of the School Doctor to adequately deal with the foreseeable increase in the risk of spreading the virus linked to the now imminent reopening of schools .
Certainly a restoration, because the school doctor was a figure present in the 80s and 90s in the area of prevention programs in the area run by the Local Health Units, then suppressed both for budgetary reasons and for a redistribution of competences among the various figures of territorial prevention. But, as we know, it didn't work everywhere.
Once the school doctor was a general practitioner who carried out an additional task: he updated the vaccination records of the pupils, ordered screen prints every other year to prevent tuberculosis or other lung diseases, scoliosis, diabetes, guaranteed control over time. How important it could be today, not only from a Covid-19 perspective.
Therefore able to work also on prevention, in a structured way, on infectious diseases, pathologies related to behavior, lifestyles and situations that only the school doctor present in the school can know with an evidently multidisciplinary approach.
A figure who over time, being present in the school complexes with continuity, can acquire the trust of the students, becoming a point of reference for the latter as well as a health connection between health agencies, pediatricians of free choice, general practitioner and families. According to the identikit, school doctors are not only professionals who deal with pediatrics but should be able to face and understand the whole period of developmental age with all the problems that this entails.
It is important and necessary to have a doctor who on the one hand plays the role of consultant for teachers and school managers and, on the other hand, working directly on children, can keep the attention on the methods of containing the epidemic. Its presence would not be limited exclusively to the prevention of Covid-19, these doctors could certainly do their utmost in other areas that are also essential depending on the age of the children, helping to discover dental or postural problems as soon as possible or even being able to offer advice. on a more correct diet and for older children information on the defense against sexually transmitted diseases and contraception in the more mature classes.
The recovery of school medicine would mean what was in the past practice, that is to go inside the nursery schools for a more accurate supervision, control of the adequacy of the structures and environments in which the children are left, surveillance of their safety also through the '' approval of the materials used for the various activities and above all preventive interventions through careful observation of the developmental and relational aspect of each individual child in its various stages of growth. It is therefore a 360 ° supervision that could also be completed through training meetings for families and school staff.
A model that could be replicated from the age of the nursery to the entire compulsory school. And mind you, many outpatient pediatricians are in favor of an increase in skills and spaces for action.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/sanita/perche-serve-il-ritorno-del-medico-scolastico/ on Sat, 14 Nov 2020 05:59:25 +0000.