The Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) recently organised a workshop for health service providers participating in the Asthma Friendly Schools Programme for academic 2023-2024, covering all public schools in Qatar.
About 400 health cadres participated in the workshop, through which the programme had been introduced, including its application and follow-up mechanism, and lessons learned from the previous experiences.
Vital topics such as asthma pathogens, symptoms, identification of its triggers, avoiding it inside schools, methods of using spirometry device and asthma medications to properly train the students with asthma in schools, as well as introducing asthma, prevention and ways to deal with it in school campuses, were discussed.
Head of the Asthma Friendly Schools Programme, Dr Maya al-Sheiba, said: "The MoPH is collaborating with the Hamad Medical Corp (HMC), Primary Health Care Corp (PHCC), Sidra Medicine and all partners to improve the quality of life for students with asthma in schools, to ensure that they have a similar educational experience to their healthy peers, reduce absenteeism among asthma patients, and improve their academic performance in co-ordination with the Ministry of Education and Higher Education."
She said that the programme represents a unique educational experience that began to be implemented 10 years ago and aims to allow students with asthma to make the most of the available medical capabilities and live in a natural supportive social environment that helps develop their skills and improve their quality of life.
School Health Nursing Supervisor in the PHCC Operations Department, Dr Musab Mohamed Ahmed Fadl, praised its extended partnership with the Asthma Friendly Schools Programme, saying that school health nurses are considered the backbone in implementing this programme in schools, providing nursing services to students with asthma as per the highest standards of professional practice.
Senior Consultant in Paediatrics Allergy and Immunology at Sidra Medicine, Dr Mahdi al-Adly, said that the programme revolves around understanding the disorder, its dimensions and how to manage it by identifying and documenting cases of students with asthma in the participating schools, providing quick access to medication, as well as establishing a mechanism to treat worsening asthma cases at school level, and identifying and reducing exposure to asthma irritants within the school environment.
He noted that students with asthma are trained by school nurses on how to use medication and peak flow meter of the air that comes out of the lung in a proper way.
MoPH specialist doctor Amani al-Khatim said that previously the programme was only implemented in primary schools, where more than a thousand students with asthma were trained on how to use the medication and the peak flow meter correctly, in addition to how to deal with irritants in their homes and schools.
She noted that the programme helped raise the awareness of more than 50,000 students about the basics of asthma, its causes, and symptoms, as well as identifying and avoiding its irritants within the school, in addition to identifying asthma attacks and how to deal with them at school.
