Tracking student medical requirements over time is an essential part of ensuring your students have the best school experience possible. Plus, as child safeguarding and wellbeing requirements have evolved in recent years, your students’ physical and mental health has become an even more comprehensive and significant part of their school life, and forms a key element of government inspections.
However, it can present quite a challenge for schools to monitor the mental and physical health of hundreds of pupils throughout their school careers. By integrating these elements with your MIS or other digital tracking tools, you can automate much of this process and keep your entire pastoral, medical and teaching community informed of important updates regarding individual and groups of students.
Why should we track student medical requirements?
As a reputable and successful school, you have a duty of care to every student who walks through your doors every day. A fundamental part of that involves monitoring their medical and well-being requirements; from medications they may currently be taking, to previous well-being concerns and health complications which may require adaptations to their learning environment.
Aside from your duty of care to students, you may be asked to provide this information as part of governmental and Independent Schools Inspectorate reviews. Responsible for the inspection of schools whose Heads are members of one of ISC’s member associations in England, the Independent Schools Inspectorate (ISI) aims to improve the quality of students’ education and their welfare.
Using a digital system can make it even easier to access this information when you need to, as Moulsford Prep School found: “iSAMS even means the School Matron can now track allergy and medical requirements over time – and support the Independent Schools Inspectorate reviews.”
Fundamentally, tracking your students’ medical requirements protects both your school and its students, helping ensure they remain safe and healthy throughout their school career.
How do we keep on top of the medical requirements of every student?
Making sure that every medical requirement for each individual student is securely logged and monitored and is easily accessible for staff members who might need to retrieve it quickly, can be an ongoing challenge for schools. This coupled with recent circumstances, which have seen staff and students working and learning from home, has resulted in a sharp increase in the use of digital platforms to support schools with this.
As your school’s management information system (MIS) is already the epicentre of all your key school and student information, it makes economic and logical sense to find a digital solution that integrates into this existing platform. At iSAMS, we developed our Medical Centre module to help your School Nurse and their Team comprehensively manage and maintain a detailed account of the medical requirements of every student. This includes a student’s full medical history, recording any overnight stays at school, any medications they’re currently taking, and an overview of any pre-existing conditions and vaccinations, including a “Conditions” section where you can store details of each medical condition, treatment, onset and action.
An additional benefit of using a tool like Medical Centre, which integrates into your MIS, is that these insights then feed into other areas of your MIS, such as Student Profiles; a single destination where you can view all the information relating to an individual student’s school career.
This means that medical data will be included in the running commentary of the school life of every student. Your staff members can gain important insights into every area of each individual student’s school experience for a whole school approach to student wellbeing. In doing so, they will be in a better position to provide the right care that each of your students requires - and at the right time.