In a recent blog entry over at About.com by Pat Bass, "
Coaches not prepared to help students with asthma," he mentions a recent study presented at the meeting of the American College of Chest Physicians that shows that child coaches are not prepared to care for kids having an asthma attack.
According to the study:
- 35% of coaches felt they had adequate training to be prepared for an asthma emergency.
- Half of coaches could not recall any asthma symptoms of asthma
- 25% could name only one asthma symptom
- Less than half of coaches said they were notified of a student self-medicating asthma symptoms
- More than 70% said they had no available medical assistance during practice or games.
There is really no surprise here. Yet I think they should take this study and compare it with similar ones performed 30 years ago and see if there is any improvement. Despite these results, are coaches more asthma wise than 30 years ago? That's what I'd like to know.
2 comments:
That does not surprise me at all. I remember many a gym class where I had to argue with the gym teacher over whether I could wait till the end of the class for my inhaler, was sent to the office (this was before students were allowed to carry their inhalers with them) on my own despite being too tight to talk in phrases, and so on.
I lay the blame for this on the parents: It's the parents' job to make sure their kid is with people who know how to handle the kid's condition. Don't worry about seeming like a "helicopter parent" by handing out copies of the kid's asthma action plan. Worry about your kid ending up in hospital or worse if you don't make sure the adults in the kid's life know what to do if the kid's asthma acts up!
This is something my kinesiology group did a project on this past term -- coaching/physical eduation teaching considerations and asthma.
And it's true. One guy in my group said he'd coached in the past but he really didn't know that much about what the symptoms were and what to DO if they happened. Additionally, I work at an after-school program that's focused on gym games; one kid last week saw my inhaler in my pocket and gave me the old "You have a puffer? Me too!" and three or four more piped up that they did also after that. I agree with Anonymous that the PARENTS need to let caregivers know about kids' asthma too -- because at both my jobs working with kids, it was the kids themselves that told me [and usually didn't even have inhalers with them..!]
This definitely needs to be something that is focused on getting people in general more educated about.
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