Georgetown: Moves are apace to improve the operation of the School Health Unit which comes as a collaborative effort between the Ministries of Health and Education, and which according to Minister of Health, Dr. Bheri Ramsaran, has not been functioning optimally.
“I am not happy how it is working,” the Minister said, even as he pointed to the fact that efforts were made, sometime ago, to train health care professional, teachers and even members of the Parent/Teacher Association to identify early student who have problems with their eyes. Failure to detect students with such challenges could sometimes result in them being slow learners or their learning process could be compromised. “I remember when we used to go to school the teacher use to send all the ‘bad boys’ to sit on the back bench because they didn’t pay attention…this was because often the teacher couldn’t handle them but now that I am a bit more educated I have realized that they probably should have been on the front bench because they didn’t see.”
He pointed to the fact that it was because of such enlightening facts that efforts have since been made to address such issues whereby a School Health Unit has been introduced. And even as he emphasised the importance of the Unit, the Minister lamented that the Unit is currently not functioning properly. “Only two days ago…I ran into a former educator and she was complaining that some of these well paid and well resourced people from my unit only appear at the Ministry of Education periodically and episodically when they need data.”
“They went to find out because I want to restart the dental and eye screening programs in the schools and they had to go to the school to find out how many schools there are in Georgetown.”
According to the Minister, “here it is you have a School Health Unit that didn’t know some of the basic things that they needed to know…so we are going to work more with that Unit, pressing it on more and making it so that they do not visit episodically but rather treat the Ministry of Education like family.”
For this reason, the Minister said that efforts will be made to revamp efforts to train teachers and other persons in an elementary manner so that they could be skilled enough to detect certain health problems that students face. Training efforts have since started to train the relevant persons to detect early vision problems and according to the Minister “we have been more successful than I thought we would have been at this point. We are doing things and we want to make things more and more frequent in this regard,” the Minister added.
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