New initiative targets improving health at Harlem elementary school (Columbia Daily Spectator - 10/08/14) #Harlem, #HarlemEd, P.S. 36 EXCERPT: Crystal Griffin is diligent about giving her daughter in kindergarten at P.S. 36 her asthma medication each day. But she knows that not all the parents of her daughter’s classmates have the same financial resources to treat their child’s medical conditions. Enter Healthy and Ready to Learn, a new initiative taking root at an elementary school in Harlem aimed at providing medical screening and treatment to children in low-income communities to improve their chances to thrive academically. “We have kids who come on mobile clinics who have untreated chronic asthma, they miss a tremendous number of school days as a result,” said Colby Kelly, senior vice president of marketing and communications at the Children’s Health Fund—a nonprofit organization that provides healthcare to low-income families and children across the United States. “They lay awake all night coughing and wheezing, and so they don’t feel well enough the next morning to go to school.” Kelly noted that parents without primary care health coverage often allow their children’s sickness to persist until it reaches “crisis proportions” and lands them in the emergency room. “We saw that there were some basic, treatable, manageable health conditions that were just epidemic among the low-income kids that we were treating that was getting in the way of their capacity,” Kelly said. The CHF developed the program in conjunction with Columbia’s Earth Institute and is supported by a $1.3 million grant from the H&M Conscious Foundation. Following more than 20 years of providing health care services for at-risk, low-income children, the CHF began to notice a pattern of health issues in students in low-income neighborhoods. In order to address the health issues students face, the CHF identified eight major medical conditions most prevalent among low-income students, which include impaired vision and hearing, asthma, hunger, dental pain, and behavioral health issues. Each school participating in the new initiative added an in-house health coordinator and social worker to help identify and provide guidance for health barriers. Programs such as vision screenings, doctor visits, and new technology like Kinvolved to track attendance are also being used.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 22:36:48 +0000
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