Maybe the most ubiquitous, and slippery, statement about asthma is that it is the primary cause of absence from school.
For example: “Asthma is considered the leading cause of school absence among children 5-17. It accounts for an estimated 14 million missed days of school each year.”
Asthma absences are considered an important surveillance indicator and the majority of states – if not all – who receive federal funding to control asthma are supposed to track them.
But monitoring asthma-related school absences is a challenge. Although schools are paid for attendance, most don’t have good systems for capturing or analyzing the underlying reason for an absence…only to determine whether it is excused or unexcused.
In some cases, schools do attempt to quantify the proportion of absences attributable to a given disease, but the majority of these strategies have major flaws. For example, we’ve heard of several districts where nurses periodically review a list of students absent from school and attribute their absences to the student’s known chronic disease (if any), whether that is the reason for the specific absence or not.
The current school absence system poses trouble for public health surveillance and we’ve recently been thinking about new ways to quickly and reliably capture more accurate and specific data.
One idea we’ve come up with is an automated phone system that would ask the parent reporting the absense whether it is health-related, and if so, to indicate the cause in a series of short voice prompts. Hopefully this would help streamline absence reporting and improve surveillance.
How does your school collect information about asthma-related absences? What would work in your school?
