NEW DELHI : The government is tapping into the pool of medical college students to conduct regular health checks at government schools to lower future disease burden. This follows a direction from the Prime Minister’s Office after a review of education and skill development sectors.
The Union health ministry, along with the National Medical Commission (NMC), has directed all medical colleges to depute teams of medical students to schools.
“Prime Minister Office (PMO) has reviewed education and skill development and one of the points which have been noted in respect of department of school, education and literacy under heading Implementation of National Education Policy is regular health checkups and screening of children in schools should be carried out. Technology should be leveraged for this purpose. Students of medical and nursing colleges can be associated for this purpose,” Anita Karwal, secretary, department of school and literacy at the education ministry wrote to health secretary Rajesh Bhushan, in a letter seen by Mint.
Following this, Ashish Kumar Panda, deputy secretary at NMC wrote to the deans of all medical colleges, “It is requested to depute interns and PG students of your college to do the health checkup of school children whenever requested by the concerned states/UTs government authorities.
When contacted, an NMC official said: “It all depends on the state/UT how they plan school health checkups for students. Our medical college students will help them whenever such help is requested by the respective state/UT health authorities.”
“We entirely support this. We have an ongoing school health program across the country,” a health ministry official said.
Queries sent to the spokespersons for the PMO and the ministries of health and education on Tuesday morning remained unanswered.
The Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman (PM POSHAN), earlier known as the Mid-Day Meal Scheme, is one of the flagship central government programmes, covering about 118 million students at 1.12 million schools. The scheme provides hot cooked meals to school children on all school days, with an objective to address two key problems for children across India—hunger and education—by improving the nutritional status of eligible children in government schools, by encouraging them to attend school more regularly and help them concentrate on classroom activities.
The health ministry already runs Rastriya Bal Swathya Karyakram (RBSK) along with the education and women and child development ministries for children 0-6 years of age and children enrolled in classes 1st to 12th government schools.
Dr Sanjeev Bagai, chairman of Nephron Clinic and noted pediatrician said that routine health screening of children at an early age is an important aspect of preventive healthcare. “Annual medical screening of children in schools include height, weight, blood pressure, BMI, eye checkup, dental and ENT and its routine health screening will help early diagnosis and intervention and prevent long-time problems later in life.”
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