Would you allow your child to be tested by army personnel in school? What about vaccinated?

[Treesofwood]

Would you expect them to need parental consent to do this to young children?

Well they won't be getting a vaccine anyway as it won't be licensed for under 18's. The vaccines will need specific paediatric trials and they can take a very long time.

As for the testing, I would be fine with that.

I'd give consent to testing but not to vaccination. Is this an opt out system?

Would you have to specifically opt out for vaccination? I find that worrying tbh.

Oh and I've read the Corona virus act and the accompanying guidance.
"Secured" means sent to the nurses office while someone calls their Mum.
There is also some provision for what to do with a Covid ridden child who's parent can't be located...which a lot of people have got a bit excited about.
But it's always been the case that social services will end up looking after your child if you don't pick them up from school and can't be contacted.
This is just some guidance about how to handle that sort of situation safely if the not-picked-up child happens to have tested positive.
It's not a plan to intern children.

I can only find in the press that mass testing is being offered and that the army has been brought in to help with that as obviously so many people are taking up the offer.
So, based on rather less scurrilous facts than what is in the OP, yes, and yes.

No I wouldn't consent

So something that would ultimately support keeping schools open, keeping teachers and vulnerable students healthy and covid-free, you wouldn’t participate in? You realise you are part of the problem?

@unlimiteddilutingjuice

Oh and I've read the Corona virus act and the accompanying guidance. "Secured" means sent to the nurses office while someone calls their Mum. There is also some provision for what to do with a Covid ridden child who's parent can't be located...which a lot of people have got a bit excited about. But it's always been the case that social services will end up looking after your child if you don't pick them up from school and can't be contacted. This is just some guidance about how to handle that sort of situation safely if the not-picked-up child happens to have tested positive. It's not a plan to intern children.

Sitting in the office while someone rings Mum 😁 Exactly. Some posters really need to step away from the Dystopian fiction.

Yes not problem to either. The Army often step in to help out with these things. I was a volunteer at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014 and we had a whole pile of Army lads and lasses doing the security at our venue. They weren't police officers or security officers either but were professional, polite, cheery and just cracked on with it.

No issues with them getting involved with this sort of thing. As for consent - what age are we talking for testing? Doesn't the old Gillick competency thing come into play? My 15 year old is still a child, but old enough to understand and make her own decisions.

FlippertyGibbert they can take blood but in many practices they are not allowed to give drugs due to indemnity insurers not being happy to cover the practice if there is a problem. At my GP practice they are not allowed to give vaccines.
Anyone can be trained to stick a needle in an arm, but since you are injecting a drug then there are other considerations. The indemnity companies will probably have the last say on who they will happily indemnify to carry out vaccinations.

So let me see - if a friend of your dc tested positive - you'd want them going back on the bus and sitting next to them all day and then coming home to you.

Or would you actually be asking WHY a child testing positive was allowed to return on the bus etc rather than waiting separately to be picked up by their parents?

Rather dramatic dystopian view of the world if you think the above is a step too far.

@mpsw

Thank *@BecomeStronger*

Has anyone had a bad testing experience at the hands of a non-HCP tester (military or other family member if testing at home)? just wondering if it's been a common issue - either more widely or now at the start of the Liverpool testing.

How many of the testers are what we would call HCPs anyway? I can't imagine actual nurses are doing it? There must have been lots of people trained quickly to set up all the centres, these just have a different uniform.

@Hoppinggreen

My kids would be delighted. I would fear for any squaddies facing some of the Y10/11 girls at DDs school though!

In fairness I wouldn't fancy the squaddies chances against my nearly 5year old ds2 . Fairly sure if his class banded together they could take down a couple of platoons. They would do cute big eyes then bam......whole platoon tied up and forced to play peppa pig trains for the rest of the day.

I mean seriously. What is the issue with testing and I truly hope noone is really stupid enough to believe that "securing " children means anything other than sending home and to another classroom while they wait?
I mean really? Theres a genuine lack of basic common sense in fear of rights being eroded that never really existed in the way some people convinced themselves they did in the first place.

It's mind boggling. The line I draw for consent is vaccination. I would be extremely surprised if any vaccination is given without parental consent. In fact I wouldn't believe it. There are several legal cases over the issue of parental consent to vaccination and they are long and complicated and full of very specific circumstances.

Everyone needs to calm down a bit. Our children are not being locked up in the school stationary cupboard

The mobile testing centres set up in the town I work in were army run ones.

It certainly made the unpleasantness of the test more bearable when it was a hot man in uniform sticking a swab up your nose.

On a more serious note, as a teacher I wish they were testing all children in school as we have several with persistent coughs in school and parents insisting it's nothing - they get seasonal coughs, they have a cold, etc.

Medically trained army personnel? As in doctors and nurses? Well of course I would.

My local hospital has loads of army medics. I don't understand the issue at all. Also, the staff doing swabs currently are not medics, and you can do it yourself too, so not much training needed there.

Vaccination slightly different, due to possible side effects, but I assume there are medics on site for issues, the kactual sticking with a needle can be done by anyone, why not a soldier?

The army did the first round of testing where I am, they set up and ran the drive through sites and we’re physically swabbing people.

I cannot think why you wouldn’t allow them?

Yes the year 10/11 girls are going to be hilarious aren’t they.

Our risk assessment has covered what do so with children suspected of Covid since day one.

There's a process that as others have said basically means staff wearing PPE keep them away from everyone else until a parent arrives. As you'd expect there's also a plan for if the parent can't be contacted or refuses to come (more common than you'd like to believe) but it doesn't involve locking children up.

OP stop trying to scaremonger people. Who do you think is carrying out tests at all the various test sites. Because it ain’t all doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals!!

The not needing consent in Liverpool I suspect (admittedly without having checked) will be more along the lines of all parents have been told this is happening and if they want to opt their child out they can. Seems reasonable to me. The whole country knows all of Liverpool is being tested.

The child will be secured, yes in a different bloody room to other kids not jail!

I'm not sure why my above post has quoted the above poster (not that they don't have common sense!). My comment was directed towards @Shinyletsbebadguys comment!

@FippertyGibbett

HCA’s do vaccinate.

Yes. But there are important qualifications to this statement.

There are people like doctors and nurses and pharmacists who can prescribe and inject the vaccine. The specific expertise they bring is prescribing. They have to be qualified to do this.

The injecting is not a highly expert activity. Yes, more than handing someone their pills but it does not require lots of education and qualifications. You don’t even need to be a clinician. Many lay people administer their own injections.

There is no vaccine programme planned for U18s.

Anyone can be trained? It took me 3 years to train to do this then continuous study, so no I disagree with you.

It really doesn’t need 3 years training to learn how to take a simple COVID test😂

Or to even how to administer a vaccination (to be fair this does take longer than being shown how to test people)

I would have no problem consenting to this at all.

I think with vaccines my assumption would be that you'd have a nurse/doctor who was taking medical responsibility for the medicine being administered (like when my asthma nurse asks the doctor or nurse practitioner who hasn't seen me to prescribe my inhaler, or a physician's associate recommends a prescription for someone and the GP prescribes it, and then someone else with some specific vaccine training administers it. That would seem the most sensible course of action to me?

Yes, fine by me.

A test is just a swab - I swabbed my child in a car at a drive- through and I’m in no way trained and only had a leaflet to go on.

The flu vaccine in schools is a spray up the nose and I’ve no idea how trained anyone is for it but I imagine all that’s needed is the ability to read the consent form properly and aim into a nostril accurately.

I hope they test all children in all schools weekly. If parents object to the test then no school place.