A Loudoun County parent received an email Friday from the Northern Virginia school district informing him that his child couldn’t attend school Monday unless they completed a required medical physical.
That sent the dad scrambling, nurse Janis Tandy said, because local pediatricians are largely booked up. The family has insurance, but couldn’t schedule a physical until the middle of November.
So, over the weekend, the student and father stopped by Loudoun County Public Schools’ mobile health clinic. Launched last year in partnership with the Inova Health System, it offers care to students in the Sterling Park community, so they don’t have to wait or risk missing class.
The mobile clinic is staffed with nurses and a nurse practitioner, who can complete the physical.
In Virginia, elementary students are required to undergo an exam, and if they don’t, they risk not being allowed to go to school.
In Sterling Park, the school district said, families face many barriers to health care, including cost, no transportation and a lack of understanding of how the health care system works in the United States.
“These kids need to get in and get assimilated,” Tandy said. “If they don’t have their vaccinations, if they don’t have their physicals, they’re sitting at home. And that’s huge.”
Since it debuted last summer, the doctor’s office on wheels has served almost 400 students, and nearly 250 of those have been referred to other services as a result.
The bus looks similar to those used to collect blood. But the health clinic variation uses the back to take vital signs and the front as a private patient room. It has hosted about 90 events since June of 2023.
The initiative was first paid for using a state grant, but the health clinic is now included in the school division’s budget.
“We were looking for a way to help our families who do not have insurance or were having difficulty getting to the doctors for their children,” said Jeannie Kloman, the school district’s student health services supervisor. “We had kiddos that needed physicals, which are required for entry into school, and we wanted to see if we could impact that and also connect them to resources so they could have a medical home with providers in the county.”
The grant that started the clinic was for community schools in Loudoun County, which are Title I campuses. In Sterling Park, Kloman said every school meets that criteria.
Once families fill out the necessary paperwork, nurses such as Tandy take their temperature and blood pressure. Their height and weight are measured, and the nurses evaluate their vision and hearing before the student and their parent or guardian meet with the nurse practitioner.
Translators are available to eliminate any language barriers, and if time allows, Tandy said nurses discuss safety and healthy eating habits.
“Education, most of us feel, is probably equal to everything else,” Tandy said. “We go through, ‘What do you like to eat?’ Fat content of food, and the parents are listening, and we have the interpreters talking at the same time.”
They discuss how much sugar could be in sodas such as Coca-Cola, or how much fat there is in a hamburger compared to a chicken nugget, or french fries compared to potato chips.
“The next part we go to has to do with car seat safety,” Tandy said. “They need to be in at least a booster seat until they’re 8 years old. They need to be in the back seat. Do they wear their seat belt?”
The feedback on the mobile clinic has been positive, Kloman said, and it’s hoping to be able to start offering routine childhood vaccines in the coming months.
“Students need to be healthy to learn,” Kloman said. “We want them to be healthy, and we want them to learn.”
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