Dr. Yaa Akyaa Boateng, a Family Physician Specialist at the International Maritime Hospital (IMaH), has advised parents against forcing health officials to forge and sign their children’s medical reports, as the practice has dire consequences.
Schools in Ghana, especially senior high schools, request some basic medical checks on students from hospitals as part of the admission process.
The Ghana News Agency learnt that instead of making their children go through the process, some parents and schools’ resort to putting pressure on health officials to sign the medical form for them without due check.
Dr. Boateng gave the advice during the weekly “Your Health! Our Collective Responsibility! A Ghana News Agency Tema Regional Office initiative aimed at promoting health-related communication and providing a platform for health information dissemination to influence personal health choices through improved health literacy
The Ghana News Agency’s Tema Regional Office developed the public health advocacy platform “Your Health! Our Collective Responsibility” to investigate the components of four health communication approaches: informing, instructing, convincing, and promoting.
Speaking on “Preventive check-ups,” Dr. Boateng said, the process of interfering with medical examination results could come back to harm the child as the forged medical check results would be used to ascertain what should be done in times of emergency when the student is in school.
She disclosed that the medical checks being carried out on the students were possible medical issues that could impact their learning and daily activities at school and were therefore important for them to undergo check-ups.
She said some of the things to be checked included ulcer problems, allergies, asthma, sickle cell status, eyes, ears, blood group, urine test, and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PD) deficiency, among others.
The Family Physician Specialist explained that, for instance, knowing the G6PD status would help school authorities and health officials know what medications to administer to the child in an emergency to save their lives before the parents could reach the place of care.
She added that knowing the things the child is allergic to also helped school management to customise the child’s food to avoid any reactions.
She said some children have also been branded as daft because they do not do well academically, stating however that the problem could be their eyes or ears, which could also be detected, and interventions started during such school medical checks, which must be taken seriously by parents and guardians.
GNA
