Don’t worry parents, you don’t need to be personally responsible for your children, Uncle Sam will do it for you…
Schools in California will be required to have someone available who is trained to assist diabetic children under a legal settlement announced Wednesday in Oakland.The agreement sets a policy requiring children who have diabetes to be provided services under federal laws that guarantee equal educational opportunities for children with disabilities.
(hat tip: Medical Quack)
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- Prescribing insulin for diabetes, do endocrinologists have a financial incentive to do so?
- A home birth gone wrong: Doctors sued for $5 million
- State health reform
- The RUC, medical home and the specter of single-payer
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{ 8 comments }
I think you’re being a bit too hard on the schools — even the most responsible parent can’t monitor a 7-year old’s blood suguar while the kid’s in school.
This isn’t a nanny-state issue at all.
I agree, there needs to be someone at the school to help children who need help. It’s the state that’s requiring it be a nurse. Perhaps an “all-purpose” aid would be just as good. Afterall, we send our blind diabetics home with the expectation that they will be able to monitor their sugar, and administer insulin – surely any responsible adult “aid” can do the same. Nurses are expensive and in short supply…that’s the problem. Allow someone else to do the job…afterall, it’s not a difficult job nor does it require a degree or a medical background.
Off base, out-to-lunch…
This isn’t an nanny state issue. Nanny state is the government telling you have to wear a seat belt, you can’t ride 4-wheeled ATVs and you can’t have a black bottomed pool–good advice in those circumstances.
As anon 3:15 pointed out, there is no way a parent can monitor a kid’s blood sugar while they are in school. This is about another government service offered to help kids–and it certainly will.
You can argue that the government shouldn’t offer this service but you can’t argue that it is an example of a “nanny state”–you misunderstand the term.
I agree that you missed it on this one.
Should the Mom or Dad of diabetic child quit work so they can show up at school to do the diabetes monitoring? Wouldn’t you like to hire a nurse or receptionist who had to leave a couple of times a day to monitor her child?
Heck, they hand out tons of pills at schools every morning for ADD and the like, and those aren’t nearly as life threatening as diabetes.
As a person who used to be a diabetic kid, I can attest to the fact that it is not hard to poke my finger and give me sugar cubes if my blood sugar is under a certain number. However, this was back when no one had lunchtime shots and lunch was covered by NPH.
Most school districts around here anyway have a school nurse come a certain # of hours per week; otherwise the health aid is there. The nurse is available by phone if there is a question on what to do for a certain child’s treatment. Also, I noticed in my nurses’ training (we had to go to schools) that the aids or nurses would basically take verbal orders from mom or dad if they were reliably informed. “Your son’s blood sugar is 65, how many lunchtime units of humalog would you like him to take?” etc.
You haven’t gotten the whole point of the legislation.
The federal law requires that there be someone at the school to provide medical care for diabetic children.
However, few school districts can afford the trained medical staff to provide for the students.
In the past, school districts would try to send all the students needing trained medical care to the same school, but parents did not like the solution.
The compromise is to allowed trained, non-medical personnel to provide the care at the individual schools — in other words, train teachers or clerical staff to care for these students rather than nurses.
This is what many states are doing.
The education unions are against it because they want more nurses in the schools.
I don’t agree that it has to be a nurse, but if my daughter was diabetic I would want someone trained in diabetic care in her school at all times.
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