Inhalers, schools and GPs

[Rosienose]

Hi
my 8 year old son has cough variant asthma. He is required to leave an inhaler with school, and also with the afterschool club he attends, not one in his bag, but one inhaler in a ziplock bag, plus a spacer handed in to school & another handed in to the after school club. So throughout the year I need to replace those 2 and also the one he has to keep at home/with us, and the GP is making a fuss about this. What does everyone else do and is the GP ok about it. This is all being exacerbated now that the guidelines on blue inhalers is changing and they do not what children to be using them more than 3 times a week. We also use a brown inhaler twice a day but obviously only need one of those.

Just interested in others experiences with inhalers in multiple settings for those under 11.

Is it the same for EYFS/Y1?

Surely it must in part depend on the design of the school. My kids infant school is tiny, basically an office with the two classrooms each side of it. All medicine incl inhalers are kept in the office. Im
happy with this even though its not with my child in the classroom it’s only right next door and less likely to be moved or mislaid than if they were all in the busy classroom

Similar here, ours is around 60 kids but it is 4-11, it’s really very tiny. Only 3 teachers. The school office is closer to DD’s classroom than her bedroom is to our bathroom, and that’s where her inhaler lives. She doesn’t carry an inhaler room to room at home as she never takes it.

I think she has precisely zero chance of taking the blue inhaler ever at school. I’m 90% convinced she’s grown out of it anyway, the plan with GP is to do an inhaler free trial
over the summer and see if there’s any difference. So we could lose the “diagnosis”
anyway. She had a bad cold over Christmas and for the first time ever developed no cough or whistling chest so they have halved her brown inhaler dosage now to see if we notice any difference. If there’s none we stop it all in May and see what happens. Her Dad had asthma as a child but grew out of it so fingers crossed they can all go in the bin!

And what happens when the school office is locked?

Unless the school have a shed load of office staff it'll be locked at times, and if, unusually, the office isn't locked when the staff are out of the room then the cupboard where the medication is kept will be (if they genuinely leave a cupboard full of medication unlocked and unsupervised at times then that's a whole other issue) locked when they're away from the office.

That's fine for antibiotics that can be taken in a window. Absolutely not fine for inhalers. Or epi-pens, which is another medication schools are often very poor at dealing with.

I’ve never seen the office in our infant school locked, and I’m up there a lot volunteering…sometimes there’s no one in it, but as there’s only three rooms to the entire school they are always easily found and would hear their name being shouted in an emergency.

medicines are all kept locked in the filing cabinet. The class teachers know where the key to this is, as does the receptionist.

completely difference set up though at my older kids big junior school. I would def want their inhalers in the classroom with them there. Having said that, have also never seen that school office locked either! There’s always someone in it when I’ve been there, sometimes up to three people

I've been in dozens of primaries and never seen a locked school office. All the primaries round my way are small and only have staffed offices for part of the day but the office itself is open. That's the same in all schools because staff need to get in and out to access things in it. Very often the photocopier is there.

I'd hope schools would have the good sense not to lock a cupboard with inhalers but there's probably some silly place that does. The problem with children keeping them in their bags is that they so often don't bring them - it's really common to check inhalers before a sports event and children blithely announce they haven't brought theirs. I'd rather there was a spare kept in the classroom.

I've had exactly this issue today. Despite a review with the asthma nurse, who agreed DD should stay on the blue and brown inhalers rather than switch to the new version, the GP won't prescribe another blue inhaler for school. Utterly frustrating.

I’ve been where you are and know exactly where you’re coming from. Really frustrating.

The GP said I was ordering too many. I had to explain in very simple terms, how one inhaler would be in school and not travel about, and one at club and not travel about. I therefore need 3 (1 for home too) in date inhalers at a time. They finally got it and gave me the inhalers. When I give them to school, I put a reminder in my diary a month before they are going to expire and start the process with the GP again.
all that said, over the past 6 months mine have been taken off said inhalers and moved to the powder ones.

You have to understand that requesting multiple blue inhalers is a warning bell to the surgery that a patients asthma is not well controlled, and should trigger a conversation. If you then tell them “oh well school needs 2 and ours have expired so that’s why we’ve ordered so many lately” then they’ll be reassured that you have a reason for ordering multiples.

Older children can have combination inhalers and use them as MART (maintenance and reliever therapy) but younger children usually can’t.

But the issue is the attitude AFTER explaining the reasoning and the reluctance to allow anymore to be prescribed.

As somebody else said the inhaler should be with the child not handed in these are the guidelines. Due the risk others have mentioned around delay in treatment. If the school have their own policy they can purchase salbutamol inhalers.