When do you call?

[KeeperOfTheIceRN]

Morning all!

I've continued to watch our flu numbers rise. Is there a certain number I have to reach before I need to notify the health department? This is our first year where we've had illness hit this hard so it's new territory for me.

I'm located in Texas, btw ?

[Amethya]

When I called the Harris county number they gave me an email to ask for a log in to send in reports instead of calling, no response yet.

I only have 3 cases.

[KeeperOfTheIceRN, ADN]

Update (in case y'all were wondering ) : spoke with my health department who transferred me to Net Health. Per the epidemiology guy, they don't really interfere with determining if schools close or not because it is ultimately up to the Superintendent. However, he did ask that IF we close due to illness, that we let them know. So there's that on my end.

To be fair, we've had A LOT on our little campus, but its been in batches. So by the time the first batch is coming back, the second batch is starting and so on. So it hasn't really dropped our attendance rate enough. I think the lowest we've gotten is 91%.

[Amethya]

update! 4 cases!

[nursekoll, BSN, RN]

In NE we notify weekly and additionally if there is over 10% absent from any building due to illness. It is completely up to the district administration to decide to close, although the health department will always recommend closing at 10% absent.

[RNTadaaaa]

Just went through something similar on my campus. I had one day with over 25 children on the same grade level and several in other grades inundate the medical room with ILI symptoms. I would have thought I was part of a prank if they didn't each look so miserably ill. Most didn't have a temp over 100.3 but several did. Because of the similarities in symptoms, grade/classroom, volume of students and the fevers, I felt it was reportable.

Unfortunately I didn't find much support initially at the local health department when I contacted them on the same day. There was no protocol for private schools it seems. The initial actions were taken by myself the Principal and VP. I could not find a local public school policy on what to do. I used to work with the dept of health in a large city and while I couldnt contact the person that was in charge of investigating clusters in schools, I went to the CDC website for steps to take.

We notified parents of the increased incidence of student illness and symptoms, what symptoms to look for at home and when to keep kid home and alert their Health care provider. We closed the school and had a company come do a terminal clean. After I faxed the list of students/symptoms to the local health department, I was then transferred to the communicable disease nurse who did find it a reportable cluster and has been great in helping with suggestions going forward. We did end up having 5 cases of flu but it was hard to determine if there were more due to many parents treating symptoms at home.

It's ongoing and there's a ton of communication necessary from the nurses office to parents, administration, staff and then students. ?

[ctate3]

We send confirmed flu numbers to our county health department. We also, send number of students sent home with flu-like symptoms.