AMMAN —
Despite global health crises, the Kingdom’s schools provided dramatically fewer
health services to students during the 2020–2021
school year compared to
previous years, AmmanNet reported.
اضافة اعلان
Jordan’s School Health
Program is set up to offer periodic free exams for public school students,
arranged by the Ministry of Health’s Directorate of School Health.
School doctors can also refer students to a health center, and laboratory tests are
provided free of charge.
Staff shortages: A
cause of concernHowever, understaffing
is a common problem for school health services worldwide, according to the
World Health Organization, and Jordan is no exception. The School Health Program
has faced challenges in meeting its goal of providing a general practitioner to
all public schools with over 500 students, and a dentist at all schools with
over 1,000 students.
Ministry of Health
data shows that checkups and referrals from
Jordanian schools dropped immensely
during the 2019–2020 school year — from over 30,000 checkups and referrals
during the 2018–2019 year to a little over 10,000 in 2019–2020.
The number of laboratory
tests also declined to around a 10th of their levels a decade ago. So has the
frequency of water testing at schools.
Water
contamination: A threat to Jordan’s schoolchildrenAs distance learning
dominated the education sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, Minister of Water
and Irrigation Raed Abu Al-Saud expressed concerns that
school water reservoirs were becoming stagnant. However, schools only conducted 871 water tests during
the 2020–2021 school year, a decrease of 70 percent compared to the year
before.
Drinking water,
however, is a major source of easily spread illnesses, and testing is a vital
means of protecting the health of the Kingdom’s schoolchildren.
According to community
medicine specialist Abdel Aziz Tayun, periodic monitoring of drinking water is a
key measure in detecting contamination that can spread gastroenteritis, viral
hepatitis A, or polio.
The health of
Jordan’s schoolchildren is at risk — and schools are in need of adequate health staff
and protective measures to protect the Kingdom’s future teachers, doctors, and
politicians.
The report by AmmanNet
was produced in cooperation with Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism
and the 100 Watts program supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands.
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