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JENNIFER LAMB: Williamsburg County, we
are medical care for a lot of our children.
We are it.
Unless we call the parents and say,
hey, your child needs to see the doctor,
they're not going-- they're not going to be seen.
We do have our quiet moments in the health room,
but most of the time it's a revolving door.
I hand out medications.
I make sure all of our policies are followed.
If we had a sick child, you know, with an earache,
we really have to call the parent, you know,
to come pick their kids up.
And with telehealth, what we do is we call the parent and say,
you know, we have your child in here.
They're complaining of an earache.
We have the permission forms here that you have signed.
Would you like for us to call and see
if we can schedule an appointment
with the telehealth doctor?
We'll set the appointment up, we get the child seen here,
get them to feeling a little bit better,
and we get them back in class.
In the beginning, it was sporadic
because you had parents who really didn't understand
the program or understand how their children could come
to the health room, see a doctor in Charleston,
and get back to class.
They were able to see, oh, this is a good program, you know?
I don't have to leave my job.
I don't have to lose work hours, work time.
My child doesn't have to lose school time.
And, you know, we can see somebody,
the prescriptions are called in, all we have to do
is pick them up in the afternoons.
Yes, it's increased greatly--
year by year.
A school nurse--
her time is very, very limited.
They have a school full of children who, sometimes,
those kids don't have the access that they need to health care.
And so they tend to go to that school nurse for everything.
Because the health room is a safe place--
it's a safe place for a kid to go and talk to the nurse
and say, you know, this is what's bothering me.
This is what my needs are.
JENNIFER LAMB: You know, you've got one coming in,
this one coming out.
And if the school nurse was the one to see the children,
then we'd have to completely shut the health or him down.
So you would only be seeing that one
child for that period of time.
We found out that it's very difficult for a school nurse
sometimes to stop what she's doing and present a sick kid,
because it's just like a visit in a physician's office.
So what we decided was it would be more feasible for one person
to have that as their designated role--
to go from school to school to school.
JENNIFER LAMB: She pretty much takes over
after we bring them in and get them into that visit.
Lynn takes over from there.
And with having an extra set of hands here,
she takes care of that student that
needs to see the doctor at that point in time.
And we can go on and continue seeing the other kids.
There's constantly a kid in and out.
You know-- a bump, a scrape, a scratch, my head hurts,
a stomachache.
You know, different kinds of things.
And so, I think, when MUSC brought on the telepresenter
role it was a big help.
But we didn't want school-based telehealth to be
a burden on the school nurse.
But we wanted it to be something that
made the child's life better and easier
and the school nurse's life better and easier.
JENNIFER LAMB: And that's what Williamsburg County is--
it's, you know, one big family.
We like to work together.
We are the school district.
We just want to see what is best for the children
here in this district.
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