To not care how important your job is, if your child has impetigo

[Normalisavariantofcrazy]

You keep them off school! More so if the sores are still active!

Got a bit of morning run rage going on at the moment

Noodle As mentioned earlier, I take immune suppressants. However, I am not ill therefore I must work in order to earn money to live.

Likewise, if children are really too ill to attend school, they are entitled to a tutor for something like 5 hours a week (compared with 25 ish taught hours in school!)

Don't assume that every child's parents are capable of home tutoring, they may have a learning disability, have missed school themselves, or whatever.

Noodle School is meant to be an inclusive environment. I have a weaker immune system than most, should I just hide at home because selfish arses can't be bothered to follow the 48 hour D&V rule?

Proud People keep mentioning the system but what do you mean? What can we do exactly?

Start a campaign maybe to make the laws which protect parents who take time off with sick children enforcable maybe??? I can see how it's difficult to prove but maybe the burden of proof should be on the employer. No doubt someone would take the piss but one could argue that it would be better than the current system.

Several parents at our school send their kids in with all sorts. And this is absolutely not families who are on the breadline or anything. Middle-class families, big houses, two career parents, put their careers ahead of their civic duty not to spread nasty infections. They just don't care about giving other peoples' children bugs. Disgusting and gives me the rage.

Indeed, noodle how dare those dirty cancer children want something approaching normal life for the, sometimes, years of treatment they face.

How dare they?

And I need to work to support my family, thanks, so not in a position to home educate.

How about, instead, you keep your actually sick and infectious child at home for a day or too, where they should be?

When my child is too sick for education, because of his treatment, he stays home anyway. If his immune system is too low, he stays home. If there is chicken pox, hand foot & mouth, slapped cheek etc etc etc going round, he has to stay home.

He has spent more time in hospital than at home for the past 18 months.

How dare he want a few days at school? All so you don't have to look after your sick child.

Should pregnant women stay locked indoors for their entire pregnancy so they don't inconvenience anyone with flu? Or chicken pox? Or German Measles? Or whooping cough?

Yeah, obviously the inconvenient kid in chemo should spend her life locked in her bedroom so some poor beleaguered parent doesn't have to take 48 hours off work. That seems eminently fair, doesn't it?

When you have kids, you accept that with the having them comes the requirement to take time off work to care for them. I extend that to both parents where applicable. It's just life.

My former HT would phone social services to collect the sick child if the parent persistently sent an ill child school.

One of those nice bubbles right noodles?

Noodle there are many children and adults with a variety of conditions or on medication that can make the, incredibly vulnerable to common illnesses.

My ds has problems with his lungs which make him more vulnerable to contracting pneumonia.

His friend has only one kidney which suppresses his immune system.

I was on chemo for a year leaving me vulnerable to infection.

Etc etc

^ I agree with everything that daisyshift, sillybob and welsh said and the HT at morgauses school had a good policy, sending a sick infectious child to school is negligent and doing it on a regular basis should warrant a referral to social care.

Dayshift - for employers dealing with healthcare, they don't give a shit about anyone's health, do they?!

I was lucky - my Ex-MIL can step in in an utter emergency, but what if I DIDNT have that?!

Serious question though - if there are children who have immune issues for some reason, how do you protect them from everything? What about things where somebody may not be sick before they are actually ill? Isn't chicken pox infectious before you know the child is ill?

Elf if DS is in a room with someone who develops chicken pox within 3 days then we have to take him to hospital to be admitted for medicine which is intended to lessen the symptoms.

Re: "normal" illnesses like colds etc we just have to deal with it. Yes, he may get a chest infection or pneumonia, but we can't protect him from everything and you can't know, without testing, which cold-like symptoms are more likely to lead to pneumonia.

Also good hand hygiene. And hoping that other parents don't send their children in when they are blatantly sick.

Elf - 'how do you protect them from everything'

You can't protect them from everything, but you do hope that people will adhere to the guidelines on infection control when they know their child has a contagious infection.

SIllybilly stupid quetion I am sure, but can your ds be vaccinated against chicken pox? Or would that be dangerous too>

ReadyToPop not a stupid question at all! He can't be vaccinated against anything until a year after treatment finishes then we have to start his vaccination programme again from the beginning.

After a year of recovery, his immune system should be up to coping with the jabs.

We only need to "worry" about CP for. 6 months after treatment although it will be 2 years before his immune system is reckoned to be back to full strength .

DD has been vaccinated against CP but we're still advised to keep her off when it's going round as the vaccination isn't 100% effective. And it will run out when she's in her 20s - prime time to be exposed to the virus when she may be thinking about pregnancy

Yes, I'm a bit hmm about the cp vaccine for the general population for that reason (although I understand why your dd was done!) but I believe there is a booster for the vaccine when you get to your 20s. So as long as she (or you) remembers she needs it she should be OK! Maybe she can get the booster a bit early? As a teenager?

The problem here is that you're all right.

Yes, of course an immuno-suppressed child should be able to go to school with minimal risk of being infected with a potentially dangerous virus. Going to school should never be a life-threatening exercise.

And yes, of course employers should allow time off for parents of sick children without resorting to excessively harsh attendance procedures. The NHS and other essential services should not be run so close to the bone that only one qualified person might be on duty during the day.

And yes, of course it's terrifying that a lone parent who is sacked for poor attendance after having to care for a sick child is unable to claim benefits for six months, leaving an entire family with no income.

So we all argue with one another about who is in the most difficult position and who is being selfish. Meanwhile DaveScam bleats on about benefit slashing and punitive sanctions apparently being helpful for those people who are disabled, homeless, or otherwise living in poverty. Gove trills away in his little 1950s grammar school fairyland about how children must attend school for 9 hours a day, 51 weeks a year. And Jeremy C Hunt (and his army of peers and MPs with lucrative links to private health care) presides over the dismantling of the NHS, creating unworkable and unsustainable conditions in NHS trusts so that the UK's healthcare system can be divvied out among Tory donors.

And as a country we return to the Dickensian conditions of families facing the threat of death from preventable (or containable) illness while other families face destitution for trying to do the right thing.

hear-hear Inertia Spot on!

Fantastic post inertia.

Spot in inertia.

I was also thinking of me and my best bud, as nurses we also face the same whip as the other nurses on the thread from our employers, but especially in my df case if she rings in because her child is sick, as a specialist practitioner In haematology, that is up to 8 pts who don't get their chemo, the 4 booked that day plus the 4 she works out the rageme for the next day, plus numerous counciling and emergency cover.
I used to be a ICU nurse me ringing in would mean 1 less bed. My job now is not life and death but you wouldn't believe it as far as my employer (who has just made my redundant) is concerned!
I will be honest I have sent my children in with colds, but not d and v as 90% of the time I have had it as well, my employer no emergency or carers leave at all, I had to use my a/l and they still mounted this up as a argument to dismiss staff, not just children, parents/partners who needed care, one of my work friends got a written warning for taking time off when his daughter was in ICU with me nigiri he though it was just them going through being fair and consistent .... 4 years later it is still being brought up in performance reviews when he requests days off for her follow up appointment.
In 24 years of nursing, I have never had a compassionate day, I have always lost a/l I have lost my Mum, Dad, 2 grandparents and 2 Uncles, this is not 1 trust this is 5 different public service employers ...

Meningitis his daughter had!

missing

As an aside though, of course children can go to school with coughs and colds. Please don't anyone think I'm suggesting they should stay at home with a cold. Yes, a cold can be extremely serious for some people, but no one would ever manage to get any work done, and it's less likely to have such serious consequences (plus the hospital swab for confirmation of the type of cold so sometimes they know whether or not to keep a closer eye on it).

Missingmum; children should go to school with colds, there is no reason to keep them off with a cold. The conversation was about impetigo, which has specific advise from the NHS and HPA to keep children off for 48 hours after starting treatment. Complications from impetigo can be very serious for some people.

People who send their children into school with things like impetigo and nits should be aware that their children are highly likely to be treated differently at school because of it.

Staff at the school I work in wouldn't take a small infectious child onto their lap for a cuddle if they were upset and would go out of their way to avoid physical contact like when they need help with changing for PE or whatever. Not a problem when dealing with older children, but it isn't easy when you're dealing with little ones. But none of us are prepared to put ourselves or our families and children at risk because of the selfish choices made by other parents.