sharjah — A school healthcare official at Sharjah Medical District Amna Olwan has stressed the need to establish a body to monitor the clinics at private schools like in Dubai.
She said recently that it was not possible to conduct visits to the 80-odd private schools in Sharjah due to the shortage of staff in the school health field.
“We approve the reports submitted by the schools without verifying the accuracy of the information given in them.”
She also stressed the need to form special committees to conduct inspections at the private schools to evaluate the health services offered to students and to ensure compliance with the Ministry of Education’s decrees.
One doctor alone could not perform the controlling role as Sharjah has a large number of private schools. Amna made this clarification in response to complaints lodged by parents about the lack of proper medical care in their children’s schools.
Muna Salah, a parent, said her son, who studies in Grade 10 in an American curriculum school, had a fall while playing football recently. The impact of the fall was on his shoulder but when he went to the school’s nurse, she gave him a medicine for headache and told him to go back to his class.
The mother added that the school’s administration contacted her an hour later and requested her to come to the school to take him to the hospital.
Fardos Ali Juma, another parent, said, “The clinic at my daughter’s school has been converted into a storage room. There is no residing nurse at the school.”
Ibrahim Ali of the Private Education Section at the Sharjah Education Zone, said one of the key conditions for a school to get licence is to provide a resident nurse; the number of nurses could be increased based on the size of the school. A Ministry of Health-certified doctor also must be arranged to make periodic visits to the school, he said.
The licences of schools that fail to comply with these conditions would not be renewed, Ali said, and clarified that inspection visits to school clinics are the responsibility of the School Health Section in the medical district.
Mohsen Rashid