What to know about the importance of getting back-to-school checkups

BOWLING GREEN, Ky. – It may seem like summer break started yesterday, but many kids are already preparing to go back to the classroom.

It won’t be long until school bells will be ringing, and students will fill the classroom. However, before that happens, some children and young adults will need to see their healthcare provider for a school physical.

Recently, News 40’s Scott Burchett sat down with Elizabeth Hawkins, a nurse practitioner with Graves-Gilbert Clinic, to sort out some of the facts about school physicals.

Hawkins says, “We’re talking about things also as screening, vision and hearing. Blood pressure, of course. We look at body mass index and how our kids growing in relation to the national growth curves. So all that is part of our assessment. In our younger kids, we are also assessing for lead exposures and autism screenings in the younger ones. But at school age, we are looking at we are screening for global developmental delays.”

And how do you know if your child needs a physical prior to attending school?

According to the Kentucky Department of Education, all students must have received a complete physical exam within the year prior when they first attended a school in Kentucky and within the year prior to attending sixth grade.

While the purpose of a school physical is to be sure your child doesn’t have any illnesses, which could hamper learning or that other students might catch, sometimes more serious health problems might be uncovered, which might not normally be detected by an observer or even felt by the student.

Hawkins says, “Maybe that back is just they’ve gone through growth spurt, and maybe now we have a little bit of a rib cage hump, and maybe we need to do an X-ray just to see if we have a significant amount of scoliosis, sometimes in doing our school blood work.”

Hawkins also says it’s important to be up to date on immunizations.

She also says many parents and patients make the mistake of waiting until the last minute to get their physical done, which means longer waits to be seen by your healthcare provider and possibly missing early school activities.