A handbook of health education.

  • Great Britain. Department of Education and Science.
Date:
1968
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A handbook of health education. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    25/196 (page 15)
    school children continues as a feature of the school health service it has been replaced to some extent by selective examination based upon continuing records and questionnaires. Vision screening, preferably annually, and the testing of hearing by an audiometer, to detect impairment of the special senses of vision and hearing, on which a child depends so much to enable him to benefit fully from the education provided, are essential routine procedures. Provision is also made for the treatment of minor ailments; for ophthalmic examination and the provision of glasses; speech therapy; ortho- paedic care (including remedial exercises); ear, nose and throat examinations; child guidance, for which the local education authority usually appoints an educational psychologist and arranges with the regional hospital board for the services of a psychiatrist at the child guidance clinic. Each local education authority provides a dental service for school children under the control of its principal school dental officer, with full facilities for treatment, including fillings, extractions, X-ray examinations, and orthodontic work, which corrects irregularities of the teeth and jaws. The school health service is especially concerned with the assessment and subsequent care of handicapped pupils, including blind, partially sighted, deaf, partially hearing, educationally sub-normal, epileptic, physically handicapped, maladjusted, speech defective, and delicate children. Substantial changes in the school health service have taken place in the sixty years since it came into being. At first its chief aim was to detect and alleviate the grosser defects which seriously hamper a child’s education, such as severe eye defects, infections of the middle ear, rickets, malnutrition, infestation and vermin, and skin infections, especially ringworm. These troubles still exist, but some of them are now rare. The school health service has never aimed at providing a complete medical service; its purpose has been to see that a child should receive the treatment needed to get the best out of its school- ing. In its earlier years the service did much to fill up some of the gaps in the medical services generally, at a time when these were less comprehensive than they are now; thus when ringworm was particularly rife (in 1920, for example, there were more than 24,000 children affected whereas in 1966 the number was only 832), school clinics run by the more enterprising authorities of the time were equipped with X-ray plant for the treatment of this condition. Now that a comprehensive and practically free medical service is within the reach of all, the curative work of the school health service has been very much reduced; today it is easier for school medical officers to promote or assess fitness and also to investigate the more obscure causes of ill health, so that, to take one example, the health visitor or school nurse who forty years ago would have been busy following up