January, 2021
The Teacher Project is an hhc activity conducted by Eisai GesmbH, a subsidiary of Eisai in Austria, to inform school teachers about epilepsy in order for children with epilepsy and their parents to go to school safely.
Below is a report from the Austrian team.
In November 2018, the Austrian ministry of education sent out an information letter to all headmasters of Austrian schools with the following content: Teachers are obliged by law to give first aid to children with an epileptic seizure and provide first aid medication if they were informed by the parents beforehand and the medication is available. This letter was sent because the workers council of teachers had always been denying this responsibility in the past. Their argument was that teachers do not have enough information about the disease and therefore cannot give first aid medication.
We were informed by our Neuropediatric KOL Prof. Martha Feucht about this letter.
At that point we started a brainstorming process together with her to think about what we as an epilepsy company can do to help solve this issue.
At the end of this process we decided to create information material of epilepsy together with Prof. Feucht. This material contains basic information about epilepsy as a disease, e.g. types of seizures, how seizures can be detected, which first aid principles are relevant in epilepsy, how and when first aid medication should be used (of course only if prescribed by a Neuropediatrician before and provided to the teachers), contact details of emergency rescue and contact details of patient groups.
From our perspective it is also very important to provide information of seizures as some school children who are thought of as lazy (due to frequent absences) or daydreamers (due to staring spells) might actually be suffering from undetected epilepsy.
This material was approved legally and from a medical point of view and then printed.
The next step was to present the project to our sales force and to give them advice on how to proceed.
After this meeting, all team members started to contact headmasters of elementary schools to offer to them the information material and a personal visit at their respective school.
This project started very successfully, and we are getting great feedback by headmasters and teachers about the support we are offering.
As we cannot reach all the thousands of schools in our country, we defined a next step: to implement a training lesson about epilepsy and first aid in the standard education of teachers.
For this we will contact the ministry of education and the regional directors of education in Austria to offer to them support with the implementation of this education.
Prof. Martha Feucht would be very happy to do this training.
The main goal of our project is to eliminate the fear of teachers to have children with epilepsy in their classrooms and to give a better feeling to parents if they have a child with epilepsy going to school.
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