By Sym Posey | The Birmingham Times
Schools open today across the Birmingham metro area and Stephen Russell, M.D., at University of Alabama at Birmingham has a few tips and recommendations for parents and guardian for a happy, healthy, and safe school year.
“To get ready to go back to school, one of the things that we like to review is to make sure that any specific health related issues that children have are being managed and taken care of,” said Russell, a double-board certified physician of internal medicine and pediatrics and an expert in primary and preventive care.
Also make sure that all the paperwork is in line for the school so that they’re able to administer medicines if that’s part of the medical plan, he said. “We do a lot of evaluation of that for starters just to make sure that we’ve done our part to provide the school, the paperwork that they need.”
In addition, Russell continued, “we also want to make sure that students are up to date on their age appropriate and recommended vaccinations.”
For most children going into sixth grade, there’s a recommendation to get a tetanus booster, which will protect children, both from tetanus, which is less common, but also from pertussis, which is much more common, especially during the cold and winter season.
“We want to make sure that you’re up to date with that, and for most of our offices, starting around Labor Day, we offer the flu shot, which we encourage all children to get the,” Russell said.
Russell stressed the importance of general hygiene health.
“It’s very common for us to see a spike of calls and concerns about children’s sick visits, either with upper respiratory issues or even sometimes strep throat, because we know that when kids get back together and start sharing their summer experiences and enjoying time with their friends, they’re also sharing not just those stories, but they’re sharing the germs that they may have picked up as well,” he said.
And, “we emphasize washing hands before lunch and washing hands after going to the bathroom both with the parents and with the kids, because our experience has been that they can’t hear it enough,” he said.
Getting to school means riding in a car or riding a school bus so “we review … wearing seat belts in the car on the way to school for age-appropriate children, making sure that they’re in the proper seat protection, such as a car seat, if appropriate for their age. And then, of course, wearing a helmet from children that might bike to school or bike while at school,” he said.
Medical action plans should also include allergies and asthma.
“For allergies, we want to make sure that parents have an updated injector … in terms of asthma, a lot of these children are going to be spending time playing outside doing physical education. In August and September and it’s hot [that] can be a trigger for some people with their asthma. Fresh cut grass is another trigger and then sometimes as the leaves change into the fall, we’ll see that as an asthma trigger.
“We want to make sure that if families have a rescue inhaler they share that information with the school nurse,but also making sure that that we’re providing updated prescriptions for of that.”
