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 “There are many children, especially in low income communities, that
are not succeeding academically because they have health conditions
that are known to interfere with learning, but nobody is screening
for them or treating them,” Dr. Irwin Redlener, Co-Founder of
Children’s Health Fund and Professor of Health Policy and Management
at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told
Reuters Health in a telephone interview. “That is something that has
to be fixed.”
The study was published online January 17 in the scientific journal
PLoS One.
Redlener and his colleagues focused on seven conditions clearly
linked to worse academic performance if left untreated. Known as
Health Barriers to Learning (HBL), they include impaired vision,
hearing problems, uncontrolled asthma, mental health and behavioral
problems, dental pain, persistent hunger, and lead poisoning.
While children who have annual checkups will be screened regularly
for these conditions, 20 percent of school-aged children did not
receive a well-child exam in the past year, the researchers say.
Poor families, Hispanic children and children without health
insurance are more likely to miss check-ups.
States can help fill these gaps by requiring children to undergo
health screening in order to be attend school, Redlener and his
colleagues say. They looked at laws on school health exams for each
state and the District of Columbia, grading them from A to F based
on whether the state required students to undergo comprehensive
health exams, whether or not it required school health forms, and
how many HBLs were addressed.
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Overall, 80% of states had requirements for student vision
screening, 75% required at least one hearing screening, and 49%
required a comprehensive health exam.
Thirteen of the 25 states that required thorough check-ups also
required that health forms be filled out, while the remaining 12
made forms available but did not require them to be filled out, or
did not make it clear that they were required.
Eight states got “Fs” because they had no laws requiring
comprehensive physical exams, student health forms in addition to
immunization forms, or screening for any of the seven health
barriers to learning. States that failed were Alabama, Idaho,
Mississippi, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Wisconsin,
and Wyoming. Twenty-one states got Ds, 15 got Cs and six scored a
“B”.
New York, California and Texas, the country’s most populous states,
scored “C,” “C” and “D,” respectively.
Fifty-seven percent of children in the U.S., or nearly 42 million,
live in a state that got a D or an F grade, the researchers note.
Just 12% - about 9 million - live in states that scored an A or a B.
Redlener and his colleagues would like to see laws in every state
requiring regular school health screenings for all seven HBLs. “This
is going to be the first annual survey of the states to see if
things are improving in terms of more states requiring this kind of
health screening,” Redlener said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2DGQzPo PLoS One, online January 17, 2018.
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