The increasing threat of litigation has forced the education ministry and the Jamaica Teachers’ Association to warn school officials about the pitfalls involved in dispensing medication to students.

Stella Maris Kindergarten and Preparatory, in Kingston, is the latest school that has moved to protect itself from lawsuits brought by parents.

Administrators at the Shortwood Avenue school have now taken a decision to stop giving medication to its young students unless parents promise, in writing, that they will not sue the school if something goes wrong.

“What we are saying is if the child is on medication and the medication has to be administered during the day, the parent must send written permission,” said the school’s principal, Sister Mary Augustine.

In the past, school officials have given medication to students – including asthmatics who may need to use a hand-held pump – under a loose arrangement with parents.

Stella Maris moved to change that policy after it became clear that some parents felt that the school should be entirely liable if something went wrong as a result of the dispensing of medication.

The school administration now has to find the common ground between helping its young charges who are in need of medical help, and protecting itself from lawsuits.

“You have to be very, very careful. You want the best for the child, and to help, but some parents have no conscience,” said Sister Augustine. “If we have a child that is incapacitated in any way, we try to help. But Jamaicans nowadays are. quick to sue.”

One parent threatened to sue the school last week, she added.

The draft education code does not address the issue of dispensing medication to students. In fact, the only reference to health in the 1980 code deals with sanitary inspection of institutions.

However, the Ministry of Education has endorsed, in principle, Stella Maris Prep’s decision.

“The teacher is not a health professional. Health professionals are the ones to (dispense medication), not the teacher,” said Dorette Campbell, the ministry’s director of communications.

The Jamaica Teachers’ Association (JTA), mindful that the education code does not speak directly to the issue of teachers giving students medication, said it has long urged its members to tread carefully in such situations.

“There is nothing in the code that speaks to that issue and so there has always been a caution,” said JTA general secretary Dr Adolf Cameron.

Ray Howell, a former JTA president and principal of Drews Avenue Primary in Kingston, agreed with Stella Maris Prep’s recent decision.

“Stella Maris is on the right track,” he said.

“If the drug is prescribed by the doctor, then it is right for the parent to write a note to the teacher to give the drug by prescription, because once the parents write a letter it will indemnify the school.”

Drews Avenue Primary does not dispense medication at all, and students who suddenly become ill while at school are referred to the health centre next door.

“We don’t recommend that teachers give any form of (unprescribed) drug to a child, not even Panadol,” said Howell.

Stella Maris Prep’s decision has met with some resistance from some parents who expressed their concerns at a recent Parent Teachers’ Association meeting, but school officials refused to back down.

The move has stirred debate within the educational and medical fields. But neither Medical Association of Jamaica president John Hall nor Dr Winston De La Haye, the chairman of the association’s ethics and constitutional reform committee, wanted to comment on the matter last week.

However, Dr Arthur Lawrence, a Kingston-based paediatrician and allergist, thinks it is an important issue that deserves much more discussion. He believes that the best option is to have a nurse on the school compound.

“There should be a school nurse, but often there is not,” he said. “So the parents have to satisfy themselves then, if they want the teachers to give (medication), that the teachers are capable (and) the teacher should make sure there is proper storage space for the medicine. So (the responsibility) goes both ways.”

But according to the JTA’s Cameron, while the education ministry provides financial support for secondary schools to employ school nurses who can provide care and administer medication, there is no such financial help for primary institutions to have a nurse on staff.

“The whole system is turned upside down. You would imagine that the primary schools would need (the nurse) more,” he said.

For most independent preparatory schools, employing a full- or part-time nurse is an added expense that they simply cannot afford.

School officials at all three prep schools that the Sunday Observer spoke with last week admitted that they had no nurse, and said their teachers routinely dispense medication to children at parents’ request. Children who suddenly become ill or who are injured while on school property are taken to see a doctor or to the hospital.

“When there is an asthmatic attack, we will take the child to the hospital; but if it is not too serious we call in the parents,” said Christine Lewis, the assistant administrator at Unity Prep.

Some schools have made special arrangements with nearby medical facilities.

“We have a contract with St Joseph’s Hospital, which is nearby, and we take our children there,” said principal of St Theresa’s Prep Dianne Taylor. “All parents know about the contract.”

However, the education ministry’s Campbell stressed the need for schools to be careful in an increasingly litigious society.

She cited a case last year, one of three that have been referred to the Attorney General’s office, where the family of a teenage boy who died during a fight with another boy at a St Catherine school blamed the school’s staff for the student’s death. They claimed school officials were too slow in taking the wounded student to the hospital.

“Parents have become extremely militant now in terms of their children’s rights,” said Campbell.

She said the number of complaints coming to the ministry has risen sharply over the years.

They range from complaints about inappropriate expulsion to corporal punishment. Fortunately, the ministry has been able, through mediation, to “amicably resolve” nearly all of them, she said.

“Since last February, I have fielded over 50 complaints – 35 were serious. I am unable to give the nature of them but in approximately 15 cases, the schools were really in breach of the student’s or parent’s rights,” Campbell said.

She added that most of the complaints were from secondary schools in rural areas.

“In the majority of the cases, parents are simply asked to come in and find some other school to go to, which is not within the regulations,” Campbell said. “(In response), they either go to the talk show or call their lawyer and their lawyer contacts us. It has gotten to the point where we are going to have to consider getting a legal officer.”