The Grande Prairie Public School Division is asking parents to stay mindful of when your child could be too sick for school through a provincial awareness program by Alberta Health Services.
The Health Education and Learning program stared around 2014 to educate parents on common minor illnesses in children and provides general information regarding the causes, symptoms, and when to seek medical care.
Stephen Page, a registered nurse, and HEAL representative says the program aims to alleviate some fears parents may have regarding their child’s health.
“We’re trying to give them information on normal childhood illnesses, normal progressions, and what things look like and when to be concerned,” he says. “There’s a lot of information that can be very scary for parents, so this kind of normalizes normal sickness.”
Page says the ultimate decision falls on the parents on whether to send their kids to school, stay home, or visit the hospital; however, he says the program provides parents with common knowledge of how to move forward if a parent is concerned with their child’s wellbeing.
“If you decide to go to the hospital because you’re concerned, which we wholeheartedly support, the HEAL program and the HEAL platform acts like a teaching, so when they arrive at the emergency department or their family doctor and the doctor says-what can I help you with, they have a language and they can speak to their specific concerns that they’ve learned from the website,” he says.
Page adds that through in-school efforts, children are educated too, and the HEAL program looks to “get kids familiar” with sickness.
“We’re hoping if we can have these conversations in schools and bring it out in different cultural languages and different ethnicities and get their value points as well then hopefully we can do a better job of educating people on what they need to know.”
The HEAL program is available online and features a number of tools for parents to utilize and educate themselves on their child’s health.
