Omoro Links Schools To Health Facilities To Ease COVID-19 Fight

Omoro District Education Department has linked primary and secondary schools to respective health facilities as they reopen today. According to education officials, the initiative under the government's School-based surveillance system will help to offer a quick response to emergency health complications with emphasis on COVID-19 and teenage pregnancies.

Rev. Vincent Oceng Ocen, the Omoro District Education Officer told Uganda Radio Network in an interview over the weekend that they have linked 168 primary and secondary schools to 27 health facilities. These include both government and private Health facilities including Health Centers II, Health Centers II, and the main Health Center IV in the 16 Sub-Counties and three Town Councils.  

He says that this is aimed at facilitating the fight against COIVD-19 through early detection of and management as learners return to school amidst the third wave. “Once they (learners) get some problem as a result of COVID-19, the learners will be referred to those health facilities immediately for assistance,” said Rev. Oceng.

He also noted that the same arrangement will cater for girls who will return with pregnancies at schools in case they develop labor pain or any other health complications. Statistics from the district show that 4,600 teenage girls were impregnated between 2020 and 2021 when the government closed learning institutions across the country to fight the spread of coronavirus disease.   

The Acting Omoro District Health Officer, Robert Ongom, says that under the school-based surveillance system, learners in both boarding and day sections will be monitored on a daily basis as part of the government’s efforts to fight COVID-19. He says daily screening of learner’s temperature, random testing, and monitoring of students presenting with COVID-19 symptoms will help educators provide appropriate medical intervention. 

Gaspher Mwaka, the Omoro District Inspector of Schools, says that the exercise to attach schools to health centers is still ongoing and expects it to be completed soon. He says all schools will be linked to Health facilities within a radius of five kilometers as part of the government move to help fight against COVID-19. 

Mwaka also notes that the education department recently concluded the inspection of all schools in the district and found that all have complied with the standard operating procedures-SOPs and are ready to reopen for learners.  

Omoro District has about 95,000 registered learners in Nursery and tertiary learning institutions with about 49,000 studying in government-aided schools. In Gulu City, the City Inspector of Schools, Proscovia Aber told URN in an interview that 90 percent of the schools in the city had fully met requirements on SOPs by the time they conducted inspections last week. 

The city has 86 primary schools, 41 of which are government-aided. 10 secondary schools are private and six are government-aided secondary schools. “Some schools are ready while others are not ready, some of the things they ought to have done by the tome of our inspections were not yet in place. But we believe that at this time, they have now rectified them and are set to reopen,” she said.