School officials in Nixa have come up with a solution with scheduling a doctor’s appointment outside of school hours.
The district announced that it has teamed up with Cox with offering on-site clinics that are free to staff and their children and free to the staff of their contracted services.
The whole program will help staff with their time and their students get a teacher instead of sub so more learning takes place.
(Information provided by Nixa Public Schools)
The best resource in education is the teacher. The worst situation is trying to schedule a doctors appointment outside of school hours. So, what does Nixa do? Well, we bring the doctor to our staff.
In a partnership with Cox, we are offering on-site clinics that are FREE to our staff and their children and free to the staff of our contracted services.
After researching various things that are difficult for our staff, those basic doctors visits were a major factor. Since urgent care requires a long wait and many have to drive to Springfield to access urgent care, it can be a 3-4 hour event just to get seen for a sinus infection, cold, or other minor illness.
And, after talking with Cox, which offers this for students in other districts with the option for staff to use them for a fee, we found that 80-90% of illnesses that staff go to the clinics for were non-contagious, which means they didn’t have to miss work if they still felt like working but didn’t know if they were contagious.
In addition, think about having to take off work to take your child to the doctor, when they can just remote in to the visit or meet the patient navigator at their child’s school at a scheduled time and only be out of the classroom for 15-30 minutes rather than a whole day off work.
This whole programs helps our staff with their time and our students get a teacher instead of a sub so more learning takes place. And, what better way than to have the clinic come to you as an employee?
We launched the program the first week of February with high usage, and then this week the clinics have been booked up all day already for Monday and Tuesday. We are seeing about 80% of the things our staff are being seen for be non-contagious and the things that are contagious are getting seen quickly and they are out of the classroom like they need to be and are not spreading the illness more while waiting to get a doctor’s visit a few days from then.
We plan to roll out access to families to use with their insurance if we find success in the program. Because when students are at school, they are learning, and when are teachers are at school, the students are learning.
