WITH LESS than 2,000 Department of Education (DepEd) school nurses nationwide, public schools have poor defenses against communicable diseases like measles. Among the most vulnerable in public schools are the at least two million children who are of wasted or severely wasted nutritional status.
For the current measles outbreak in Western Visayas, Metro Manila and other regions, those 2,000 nurses can be strategically deployed to localities where the incidence of measles is high. The spread of measles in almost all regions of Luzon and Visayas is one of the reasons why we urgently need more health care professionals taking care of our children in schools.
At the DepEd, the school nurse to student ratio is 1:5,000. The public school nurses are not assigned by school but by city and province across the various DepEd school division offices. These nurses are certainly not enough to attend to the health and nutrition of our more or less 27.7 million school children and teenagers under DepEd’s care. With this kind of situation, many schools have no school nurses on duty to take charge of the many school health and nutrition activities that riddle the school calendar every year.
There’s a proposed measure that addresses this concern. House Bill (HB) 7874 seeks the creation of the School Health and Safety Office (SHSO) in every public school, including state universities and colleges (SUCs), nationwide. The country has 13,396 secondary schools (including 5,965 senior high schools), 38,648 elementary schools, and 112 SUCs.
The SHSO must be manned by qualified, licensed, and certified personnel. Having nurses is basic. At the minimum of one nurse per school, passage of this law would mean at least 52,156 new jobs for nurses at our public schools. The proposed measure provides for two nurses for schools with up to 3,000 students and three nurses for schools with more than 3,000 enrolled.
HB 7874 also requires the hiring of doctors, dentists, guidance counselors, psychologists, psychometricians, emergency medical technicians, security guards, and utility workers for the School Health and Safety Office of the public schools. By deploying many nurses to the public schools, a heavy burden will be lifted from the shoulders of our public school teachers because they have been carrying the workload that health care professionals should have.
