The Board of Extremadura has developed a protocol to attend to the 5,000 children or adolescents with diabetes in educational centers, to have their illness perfectly controlled, train teachers and get these students to be fully integrated.
The protocol, which is intended to be fully developed in the last quarter of this school year, has been presented at a press conference by the managing director of the Extremadura Health Service (SES), Ceciliano Franco;the Secretary General of Educational Quality and Equity, Antonio Tejero;and the president of the Federation of Diabetics Associations of Extremadura, Luis González.
Of the 100,000 people who have this disease in Extremadura, 70,000 of them diagnosed;The smallest part corresponds to the diabetes that occurs in childhood and adolescence, type 1 mellitus, which produces an absolute insulin deficit.
The symptoms of this disease are production and elimination of urine, thinning, intense thirst and others, and its strict control is necessary for the child to develop physically and intellectually properly.
In the region there would be up to 7,000 children with this problem, 5,000 of them diagnosed, and annually between 100 and 125 cases, according to Franco.
The protocol sees the light after two years of work due to the demand of the families of sick children, since they saw "goodwill" in the Board and the teachers, according to González, but considered it necessary to have a protocol of actionto give "security" to their children when they are at school.
Thus, this document contains a series of supporting measures and intersectoral work, whose main objective is to launch tools that help obtain optimal diabetes control of these people in the educational field.
The elaboration and implementation of this protocol has required a multisectoral and coordinated work and that has required the joint work with entities such as Freapa, Concapa, Federation of Diabetics Associations of Extremadura, as well as with professionals of education and health.
It contemplates all possible situations that could occur in educational centers in relation to diabetes, as well as promotion and education measures for health, support and joint work from health and health care centers, among others.
Some actions already executed have been the purchase of refrigerators to install in educational centers so that these people can safely save their medicines and other useful, as well as the realization of various training activities for both health professionals and teachers.
According to Garcia, the stable protocol "who has to do what" at a certain time -a crisis of hypoglycemia, for example -, and collects special needs that these students have, such as changes in exams of exams by medical reviews or in terms ofAlternative menus.
The families have highlighted, above all, the personalized plan that the student will have with diabetes and that, according to Garcia, guarantees that he meets the treatment while in school.
In this regard, Franco explained that there will be a nurse from the health center in the area in charge of each school, which will keep a record of these students and will be in charge of the personalized plan.
It's about "the closest thing to being at home," according to Tejero.
On the other hand, to the question of the journalists, Franco has assured that the diabetes patients in the region have guaranteed reactive strips.
The person in charge of the SES has explained that the position of his department is to "reduce" the supplier brands, but not the number of strips.