Dur Afshar Agha, Amber Faisal.
Is school health service beneficial?.
Pak Paed J Jan ;30(2):85-90.

Background: The purpose of School Health Service is to help every child to derive full benefit from education.This entails the prevention of disease, making sure that ill children receive appropriate treatment, caring for handicapped children and bringing medical expertise to learning problems. In Pakistan inspite of efforts made by Government, School Health Service fails to achieve its purpose, hence the need of this study. Objectives: 1) To establish effectiveness of school health services for students. 2) To identify types of need based services in School Health Program. Design: Cross-Sectional Descriptive study. Setting: The study was conducted in ten primary schools of Nishter Town Lahore, from February 2004 to May 2004, in collaboration with City District Government Lahore. Methodology: Comprehensive health assessment was performed on one thousand five hundred and ninety six children aged 5-10 years, by the school health teams.Health cards were designed for this purpose. Children requiring specialized care were referred to `The Children`s Hospital, Lahore.` Results: Medical screening of 1596 school children revealed that 1524 (95.6%) had different health problems, which were managed by the health teams; 87 children needing paediatrician advice were referred to the hospital. Conclusion: The study identified a variety of health problems among school children to which even they were not aware in majority of cases. Most of these were quite preventable/curable. It is therefore essential that a comprehensible school health service with referable system should be established so that such health problems could be prevented or managed effectively.

PakMediNet -Pakistan's largest Database of Pakistani Medical Journals - http://www.pakmedinet.com