The risk management of childhood diabetes by primary school teachers

Abstract

This article explores the attitudes of primary school staff in relation to managing children with diabetes. It reports the findings of a qualitatively orientated study in which we conducted in-depth, semi-structured face-to-face interviews with 22 staff that held a variety of positions in primary schools and had a range of experience of caring for children with diabetes. We consider the anxieties and apprehensions expressed to us by our interviewees (covering topics such as injecting/blood testing, and the reactions of parents to school decisions), in both their capacities as educators and, increasingly, frontline care-givers to other people's children. The expansion and formalisation of healthcare responsibilities within the primary school is shown to have impacted upon the risk assessments made of children with diabetes. Analysis of the data therefore focuses on health related risk anxieties as they are played out in adult/child relations and in the specific context of the primary school.

Keywords:

• risk
• diabetes
• risk assessment
• risk management
• children
• primary schools

Acknowledgements

Funding for the study from which this article has developed was obtained in part from an alumnus of Warwick University and in part from Novo Nordisk pharmaceuticals. Funders had no influence on how the data were collected or analysed.

Notes

1. The National Diabetes Survey – ‘Growing up with Diabetes’ (2009) can be found on The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) website. http://www.rcpch.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Growing_up_with_Diabetes_Report.pdf

2. For example, Supporting Pupils with Medical Needs: a good practice guide (Department for Education and Skills and Department of Health 1996), urged schools to have a clearly known and understood policy on healthcare practices formulated in partnership with parents. Supporting Pupils has since been superseded by Managing Medicines in Schools and Early Years Settings (2005) which specifically recommends that staff agreeing to administer blood glucose tests or insulin injections to children with diabetes should be trained by an appropriate health professional.

3. See Holloway and Valentine (2000) and Collins and Kearns (2001) for discussions of the social construction of the school as a private and supervised institution and, by contrast, of the identification of risk in the journeys of children to and from it that occur in a public, and therefore potentially dangerous, space.

4. Hypoglycaemia (‘Hypos’): An almost unavoidable acute complication of insulin treatment. When mild it can cause symptoms such as shaking, sweating and hunger but when severe can lead to coma or convulsions.