IHBAK Life-Sustaining Emergency Care Policy

FILE: IHBAK

LIFE-SUSTAINING EMERGENCY CARE POLICY

A primary concern of Regional School Unit 1 shall be the health and safety of its students. In emergency situations involving accident or illness, school employees should undertake reasonable efforts to provide first aid or life-sustaining emergency care to the extent of their knowledge and training, and/or to seek the assistance of school medical personnel or other staff members to obtain emergency assistance for the student.

For those students who may present an on-going need for medical intervention at school, including a need for life-sustaining emergency care, school personnel shall convene a team meeting for the purpose of developing an individualized plan to address the child's specialized health needs. The team should include persons at the school who are knowledgeable about the child, as well as the child's parents and a school administrator. The team may consider requests from parents that alternative forms of life-sustaining emergency care be used as part of that plan, but those requests must be substantiated by specific medical documentation from the child's physician. The team shall not approve a parental request to deny all life-sustaining emergency care for a student, but may specify that only certain types of intervention are appropriate in a particular situation.

For purpose of this policy, "life-sustaining emergency care" means any procedure or intervention applied by appropriately trained school staff that may prevent a student from dying who, without such a procedure or intervention, faces risk of imminent death. Examples of life-sustaining emergency care include: efforts to stop bleeding, unblocking airways, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, and cardiopulmonary resuscitation ("CPR").

Reference: 29 U.S.C. § 794(a)

Adopted: October 12, 1994

Revised: June 14, 2004