Welcome to a blog for those who are concerned with health care in the modern age. This is a blog that welcomes articles and your experiences with health care today.
First, the situation of school nurses in Israel. School nurses were privatized in the summer of 2007. Before then, nurses worked for the Ministry of Health, a government body. That gave nurses just enough time to perform growth assessments, hearing and vision tests, vaccinations, and student education, plus one on one time with the students. Nurses reported yearly on what they accomplished that year.
Then it changed literally overnight. One nurse had nine schools instead of two. Management was interested in numbers. Every day nurses reported how many growth assessments, vision tests, etc were performed, and not how many lectures on health care or one on one counseling.
Now, nurses cannot count the number of schools they are sent to, and there is not only one school nurse at a given school - they are sent to a school, expected to do a certain amount of activities, and leave. There are no hours allocated for health education or follow up. Nurses send notices home alerting parents to, say, a hearing problem, and have no way of following up to see if the note even reached home. There is no "school nurse" any more, just a team of nurses who come and go. This means the bare minimum care is given, no follow up, no continuity, no feeling of community. The families do not have a personal nurse to turn to, they can call management's toll free number and get guidance through a secretary if they wish. Not much personal touch there.
Here is an article I like on the following web address, I include some excerpts below.
http://www.oikos.org/radchang.htm
The Future of Mental Health: Radical changes ahead
by Fred Baughman Jr
USA Today Magazine 3/1/97
Subject: USA Today article - making an attack on biological psychiatry in a very widely read popular American news-magazine, and outlining the view (by Baughman, M.D.) that managed care in the U.S. is shaking the biological psychiatry tree:
"In an editorial, "In Bed Together at the Market--Psychiatry and the Pharmaceutical Industry," psychiatrist Matthew Dumont urged that psychiatry declare itself an arm of the pharmaceutical industry."
Some good news - "Over the protests of the psychiatric establishment, finite treatment plans with explicit goals have been enacted and have succeeded. General practice physicians, psychologists, and social workers are replacing "biopsychiatrists."
How long will it take managed care to discover the lack of a scientific basis of virtually all psychiatric diagnosis prognosis?"
"In a quid pro quo relationship with American public schools, child psychiatry has made "learning disabilities," "brain diseases," and "special education" out of the illiteracy, alienation, and discomfiture that are the result of massive educational malfeasance. ....Attention-deficit disorder (ADD)--invented, in-committee, at the American Psychiatric Association, but never proven to be a disease-..."
See more on above website.
Hope to be posting more of Matthew Dumont's articles soon.
Please share your thoughts, thanks!
