Last update - 00:00 02/11/2007
Parents up in arms over private school healthcare plan
By Ruth Sinai, Haaretz Correspondent
Parents and nurses alike are furious over an experimental program that transferred responsibility for school nurses from the Health Ministry to a private organization, the Public Health Association, last April.
Parents were outraged by a recent letter from the PHA telling them that if they want information from their child's medical file, such as which vaccinations he received or whether she was given a hearing test, they will have to pay NIS 300 - unless the file is not found, in which case they will be charged "only" NIS 200. Those who can prove financial difficulties will be charged NIS 68.
The letter also demanded that they sign a confidentiality waiver, which would allow the PHA to disseminate information about their child's health and absolve it of all obligation to protect this information.
The nurses, for their part, consider their workload "abnormal, unsafe and undoable," as a group from the South wrote in a recent letter of complaint. For instance, that letter said, one school with 800 students has been allotted only 13 hours a month of nurses' visits - which works out to roughly one minute per student. Nationwide, there are 300 school nurses, or one for every 5,000 students.
Another nurse complained to the national nurses' union about the PHA's decision that all first- and second-graders in the Haifa area had to be vaccinated within a month, terming this an "impossible" task due to the large number of students involved.
"We run about like drunken ants, just vaccinating, vaccinating, vaccinating," wrote yet another group of nurses.
And because nurses are constantly moving from school to school, and sometimes even from city to city, they do not know the students and cannot monitor their development - which endangers the students themselves, a fourth group charged.
Dr. Yitzhak Kadmon, head of the Council for the Welfare of the Child, offered an example: "This morning, a nurse called to relate that a fatal mistake was almost made" - she almost vaccinated a girl who was allergic to the vaccine. "Only at the last minute was a disaster averted," he said.
PHA director Yehuda Cohen dismissed the complaints, saying that 160,000 children have been vaccinated since September, "without a single problem." Nurses are not being asked to exceed safety limits, he insisted, but "some of the nurses have gotten used to not working too hard."
But Yehuda Eliash, head of marketing for the Me'uhedet health maintenance organization, paints a darker picture. In Rosh Ha'ayin, for instance, half the children were not vaccinated last year, but the HMO could not even get a list of their names from Cohen's organization, he said.
At a joint meeting two weeks ago of the Knesset Education Committee and the Labor, Welfare and Health Committee, Alex Levanthal, the Health Ministry's director of public health services, told MKs that he and every other public health expert in Israel had objected to transferring responsibility for school nurses to a private organization. However, he said, he had thought the PHA would at least be supervised. In fact, this has proven impossible, he said, because there are only seven supervisors - a mere fifth of the 35 needed.
Reuven Kogan of the Finance Ministry promised that the number of supervisors would double next year, but accused the Health Ministry of "failing to cooperate" with the PHA "in supplying vaccinations, or in anything else that depends on them."
Kogan also said the transfer has saved the state NIS 7 million. But that figure omits a NIS 20 million contract that the government signed with Magen David Adom - for providing emergency services to the schools instead of the nurses.