NGO pitches to help schools reopening to screen, isolate, treat, monitor students’ health Promises to bring Integrated health services at the school doorstep
Hyderabad: Schools across TS are reopening on 1st Sep, 2021 after a long hiatus of over 15 months. Many parents are wary of sending the children back to school in view of the risk of catching COVID. Schools are also keen to ensure that children remain healthy and there is no outbreak of COVID & other seasonal diseases particularly dengue when the schools reopen.
In light of the prevailing situation, NGO, Helping Hand Foundation (HHF), which has worked in successfully delivering telemedical support & allied services to large residential schools and to about 25k plus citizens during the pandemic, has come up with a plan to extend, support to schools, in order to help schools, screen, triage, isolate, treat, and monitor students’ health and to prevent and control spread of COVID and other seasonal diseases. The same will be done in a not-for-profit mode.
HHF, has proposed an online model of telemedical support system wherein trained Doctors & counsellors will receive calls, record complaints, assess and provide online prescription and track.
In the onsite model, the NGO will offer setting up a triaging system, provide nursing assistance, counselors, doctors to screen, isolate, treat and monitor students. From the learnings, best practices of implementing COVID protocols can also be suggested to schools that are interested.
Further it will provide ambulance services and help in facilitation of consultation & admissions in the event warranted in all government hospitals in the city.
The NGO, further said that other seasonal & infectious diseases like Dengue, Typhoid, Viral fevers are at their peak, particularly Dengue is children is on the rise and it becomes very important to screen, isolate and arrive at differential diagnosis at the time when the risk of COVID still lingers.
HHF, has been working with a large network of over 200 plus schools covering 1.5 lacs students for the past few years in which the main stay of screening and treatment is through the telemedical route. The health support system provided to these schools, has given the HHF doctors and counselors, vast knowledge & expertise in telemedical treatment modalities during COVID, the same model can be replicated to support other schools the NGO said.
The NGO has been using social media handles like WhatsApp to run the telemedical operations, the WhatsApp tool gives the scale of operations and the ability to provide health care services from even remote areas where health care services are not easily accessible.
We have established a well-defined template to support schools through the telemedical system and on ground modalities, which can be safely extended to other schools in a non-profit mode, said Mr. Mujtaba Hasan Askari, of Helping Hand Foundation.
