The provision after the battle of the parents of an allergic child and their lawyer
(Giovanni D'AGATA) Certain rights and services take for granted, but then when the dramas happen, it turns out that this is not always the case. One of the issues that we thought were "normal", that is, the regulated administration of drugs to children during school hours, in reality, in some regions, at least until yesterday, was a chimera, with the consequence that so far it was a fortune that there were no negative consequences for young students who needed medicines at school.
Only until a few days ago, in every school in Puglia, in fact, administering drugs to minors was something at the limit of practicability due to the absence of guidelines. It served the long battle led by a family of Polignano for their daughter and their lawyer, Giuseppe De Filippis, to convince the Region and Provveditorato to sign a shared solution to put a patch to this deficiency.
"Together with the family of the little girl suffering from a serious problem, we fought, and after 2 years, won a long battle of civilization aimed at protecting the right to health and the right to study - explained the Polignano lawyer interviewed by the local Polignano newspaper “Fax” - constitutionally guaranteed rights also to all those subjects who require the administration of drugs during school hours. Finally, in recent days at the Puglia Region, the Regional Protocol for the Administration of Medicines during School Hours has been signed, which contains the relative guidelines ».
In practice, it was necessary to reach the end of 2018 for the Puglia Region to finally hear the alarm cry of a family that did not give up in the face of bureaucracy and administrative inertia and to realize that the right to study and health they cannot be denied to minors (and not even to adults) during class time. "Puglia, in fact, was one of the few Regions in Italy that had not yet adopted any protocol in this regard - continues to explain the lawyer - In particular, the aforementioned protocol has attributed an organizational function to School Managers, aimed at identifying the staff made available to the administration of drugs to the pupils during school hours, the District Directors were entrusted with the function of organizing, in conjunction with the Medical Managers, training and information events for school staff and management of critical issues or transitory situations; the school staff made available for the administration of drug therapy in the school environment, recipient of the training - information from the ASL, is entrusted with a function of liaison with the parents - guardians and the Headmaster; physicians have a specific identification function of drug therapy that can be administered during school hours, with relative methods of taking and storing drugs.
It is, therefore, a protocol of exceptional importance considering that, finally having established "who must do what" in the hypothesis in which during the school hours it was necessary to administer drugs can constitute, as in the case of the child mentioned we are talking (affected by a very serious form of milk allergy, eggs and related proteins that if ingested cause serious "anaphylactic shock with consequent risk of life if it is not immediately given the relative life-saving drug) the difference between life and death".
And the lawyer De Filippis certainly does not send them to say when he states in the interview in the local newspaper: "I am obliged to thank all the institutions that in any case made it possible to sign the aforementioned protocol, not being able to exempt myself from a final consideration. Although the national news reports very often reports of deaths due to allergies, even during school hours, it took two years to reach the signing of the protocol. If something similar had happened in our schools, who would be responsible for it? For this reason, together with the child's family, aware that we have won an important but certainly not definitive battle, we will check daily the concrete implementation of the signed protocol because, it is important to remember, you can die of allergy ". In short, for Giovanni D'Agata, president of the "Rights Desk", good news for all children, their families and school operators who can be guided by certain and agreed lines of action, but also one more reason to remember that the right to health and the right to education can be mutually protected and applied.