Anyone else work in a school medical room?

[ItsRainingKids]

Specifically secondary?

We have seen a huge upsurge in footfall over the course of the year. I'm just wondering if this is an 'us' thing or other schools are seeing the same phenomena.

We're a fairly big school but don't have a sixth form and I'm often recording 100+ visits a day. Even accounting for colds and the time of year, it's a 36% increase for the same time period in 2023 and a 23% rise from last year.

Everything I can think of to mitigate what's going on has a contradictory side. I'm at a loss.

kids are coming to medical room due to not feeling well physically and mentally - it should be a place of sanctuary not where they are seen as hassle

I agree re mental health. I have some training and have asked to go on an adolescent MH first aid course but was told I should be directing anything like that to pastoral teams. Which is great is I can actually get hold of anyone!

That sounds like a lot OP. What’s changed in the last couple of years? Obviously some uptick in being ill is expected just due to an additional illness (covid) regularly circulating, along with the longer term health issues that will come with some of those infections.

Presumably a proportion of children visiting the medical room may be doing it to get out of lessons - has this increased drastically? What do you think has led to this increase?

There has been a lot of focus on increasing attendance and presenteeism - pressure to attend when not really well enough or to get a tick in the register that morning, will lead to higher numbers of children being unwell in the day (those that haven’t got better through the day and the knock on effect of spreading to other people). It stands to reason that more children will be in school when unwell, hence more trips to medical room.

What sort of mitigations were you thinking? The current situation sounds pretty unfair on you.

Well, as somebody of many, many years standing in multiple roles in education as my actual job rather than as a volunteer, I'd be advising you and a panel to not make emotional knee jerk reactions on the basis of a personal traumatic experience of a different child's Asthma Care Plan or medication permission form not being followed and to consider the actual content of the evidence provided - instead of an assumption that I'd be a person telling them to go away (when I don't actually work in medical) when there's a leg with more bends in it than normal human skeletal structure dictates is normal.

Basic safeguarding includes completing CPOMS notifications for all such occurrences because they could be real, they could be anxiety, could be undiagnosed SEND which can be evidenced from the records and context such as always in particularly noisy lessons, could be bullying, or they could be due to other circumstances that fall under the complete picture that DSLs needs AND they could be trying to get sent home because homework hasn't been completed.

👏🏽

@potato08

You obviously have had a couple of scary experiences, but it feels as though you envisage welfare/medical roommataff seeing kids in a vacuum.

We get to know 'our' kids, we know the ones with other stuff going on - be it mental health or safeguarding/CP; we know the ones who try it on to get out of classes (which doesn't mean we don't do our due diligence when they turn up); and we know the ones who have medical conditions that need on going care.

I could name every one of our diabetic students, I know birth dates off the top of my head for students who've needed ambulances more than once and I have great relationships with their families.

But there are limits to what one person can do and if I want to maintain this standard of care I need to address the unnecessarily high numbers we're seeing atm.