we took MilliCal away to Girl Scout Camp yesterday. On the way in, they get a quick physical. Then they leave their medications, all tagged and bagged, with the camp nurse.
This surprises me. When I went to camp, few kids had any sort of regular medicine, and they took it with them. Now it seems as if each kid has a slew of medicine bottles, and the nurse apparently keeps tabs on them so they kids won’t OD, or something.
I was shocked. Pepper mill suggested that a lot of kids are taking medication for ADD, ADHD, and the like. I’m sure there are medicines for other conditions (MilliCal has medicine for her skin rash, which we had to leave with the nurse), but this seems like an odd development.
Does anyone have a similar experience? Or insights/
How old are the kids? I seem to recall hearing that prescription drugs are far more abused by kids than are more illicit drugs. They’re really easy to come by, especially if you have a bunch of kids together at a camp. I’m sure there would be plenty of children willing to share.
Fairly standard at Boy Scout camps as well. You declare all meds the kids is on, and then you check them in with the health care team at the camp. Once there, the kid has to report to get their pills.
On campouts with just our Troop, we offer to have one of the adults hold all medications and disburse as required. We let parents choose if they want their kid to self-medicate instead (usually if the boy is older).
One issue that I also now see is when summer camp is the first week after school lets out. A lot of parents seem to put their kids on a drug holiday for the summer. However, the first week for some kids can be tough, and the camps ask that parents NOT use summer camp as the time to take the child off of behavioral medications.
I have 50+ Boy Scouts in my Troop, and a measurable number are on meds. However, I also have a reputation of being a Scoutmaster who will happily take those kids - so I might get a few more than other Troops.
I haven’t been a camper since 1990, but that was how meds were handled then. I think there are a number of reasons for it:
It ensures that kids are compliant with their drug schedules
Kids can’t sell their meds to other campers
Kids can’t steal meds from other campers
Raccoons, mice, crows, etc. can’t steal the meds
The meds won’t get lost
All in all, it shields the camp from a lot of liability and the parents from the expense/hassle of replacing drugs that the kids didn’t take proper care of.
I remember a fair number of kids having allergy medicine. Spending a week in the woods was no time to go without that. And there were typically a few diabetic kids, and surveys tell us there are more of them today. And one or two usually developed some form of creeping death while at camp, and had to get something prescribed.
It’s the same (or worse) for the camps my kids have gone to.
For the Boy Scout camp, we have to put all of Dweezil’s pills in a peel-and-stick cardboard organizer so the nurse can pop out the appropriate dosage at the correct time - truly idiot-proof (though as we found this last time, not kid-proof - Dweezil failed to show up to take a couple of doses).
For Girl Scout camp, it’s quite idiot-prone: we fill out paperwork, but the pills remain in their initial bottles. We have no clue whether she’s missed a dose or not unless we do a before-and-after pill count.
For their other camp (YMCA), they actually like us to bring the pills in the weekly organizers that we use at home.
Nobody likes the kids to handle their own meds. A liability thing, I imagine - what if the child misses something essential. Or if it’s something like Ritalin, what of s/he shares, I guess.
That was pretty standard practice when I was a boy scout leader 5-10 years ago. Mostly my kids just had allergy problems, though. Nothing more serious, thank bog.
There’s an idea called the Hygiene Hypothesis that briefly states that parents who protect their kids so thoroughly when they’re infants keep them from being exposed to dirt, pathogens, allergens, etc at that age, and the kid’s immune systems never learn to recognize all of that as normal parts of the environment. Later on, when the kids come across cat dander, grass pollen, or whatever, their immune systems go hyperballistic, triggering allergies and such. I am by no means a health professional, so I can’t say if there’s any truth to it, but to me at least, it sounds plausible. Any health pros out there who can confirm or refute this?
The camp I do is for kids with a medical problem, so a lot of meds are involved. All of them, including all adults, are kept in Club Med, with the exception of asthma inhalers, they let the kids keep those, although not all of them do, it depends on how frequently they need them.
I used to be a medical officer at a Boy Scout camp. Part of the BSA camp regulations is that the camp must keep and distribute the camper’s medications. It’s been a while, so I don’t remember all the specifics, though.
Campers were allowed to keep emergency meds like Epi-Pens and rescue inhalers.
As one of “Those” parents who has to send my child to camp with meds, let me warn you about one on-line pharmacy that has been nothing but a hassle: Campmeds.
They charge you additional fees to do what you can do yourself, which is deliver meds directly to the camp. Why one needs to is beyond me but lets assume there are those who do.
And what does Campmeds do for that fee? Make you do a lot of extra work by getting prescriptions from docs (even if you are already on refills), and then making you jump through a ton of hoops when they mess it up.
In our case, I told my wife it wasn’t necessary, we can bring the meds, but she signed up anyway because she thought she had to (she didn’t, I checked). Good thing I told her to bring meds anyway–Campmeds never delivered, and even though we had acknowledgments from them, they said they never got the order. They then tried to blow a lot of crap past my wife about procedures and policies–bad move, she’s a pharma attorney and knew they were BS’ing. So now we are expediting an order and fedexing it to camp. She’ll hand the bill off to the ligitator to handle (me) and we’ll get the money from Campmeds. Be assured of that.
I went to summer camp throughout the 80s at a YMCA sleepaway. I spent the whole summer for 8 consecutive years so I had plenty of chances to observe. Children were not allowed to self-dispense anything - not an Advil for menstrual cramps, a claritin, or anything. Fir a no energency you had to go to nursing iffice hours if you wanted that sort of thing. Daily medications were dispensed from labeled containers sent by parents. Rescue inhalers were allowed, I can’t remember about epipens. They were in every first aid kit so maybe not.
Many kids had medications, whether for allergies, asthma, vitamins their parents sent along, or lots of other things. Some were getting Ritalin, most likely. Medications at camp was not at all unusual.
I’ve just sent my two 15 year olds off to camp in the US. I don’t have a problem with them turning their meds over to the nurse, but the requirement for a form signed by their doctor for over the counter medication, including vitamins, really pissed me off. I think as a parent I should have the right to sign a form for lactaid pills or vitamin C or whatever the hell else anyone can walk into a drug store and buy. I understand the need to control the distribution but undermining my right to authorize the use of an asprin.? grrr. Considering I use private healthcare in the UK I certainly wasn’t going to pay my GP £80 to fill out the form!
Not a pro, just an anecdote, but my mother let us play in all sorts of mud and dirt when we were kids, and didn’t always demand a nightly bath. We still have tons of allergies in the family, and some of us were allergic VERY early in life, showing signs of eczema within a month or two of birth, and one niece having her first life-threatening asthma attack as an infant. So letting the kids get dirty is not a guarantee of living allergy free.
Admittedly, were more allergic than most and highly prone to auto-immune disorders from arthritis to sarcoidosis, so we may be an outlier.
When I was in camp about 40 years ago I was a kid that took meds with her. There always were a few other kids in the same boat so it’s not entirely new although the frequency might have increased.
I did have the problem that the camp mandated ALL meds be kept locked up in the nurse’s office, which had limited hours (though she’d come out for an emergency) without exception. Including emergency meds. Now, back then I didn’t need an asthma inhaler or epi-pen, but the kid with the bee allergy was required to keep the epi-pen back at the nurses station instead of either her having it, or a counselor having it, when she was out and running around field and forest - you know, where the bees are? And there was the time I started having a bad reaction while out in the middle of a field of wildflowers. I knew what was happening and begged to be taken to the nurse but was told I wasn’t getting out of the hike that easily. Then I was a sneezing, coughing, snot-drippy mess and told I was disgusting, and I begged to be taken to the nurse’s office and was told no, I could go later, after dinner, and stop disrupting everyone else’s time. Then my eyes swelled shut and all hell broke loose. My parents got a panicked call from the camp director who said I had to be taken to the hospital. They asked what was wrong. The camp director explained I had had a bad reaction. My parents asked where the allergy medicine was and, well, it turned out that instead of getting a regular dose they were only allowing me to go to the nurse as needed as determined by (untrained) counselors, who never wanted to take me because I looked fine to them and they thought I was just a whiner, and thus I had been without any medication for the better part of a week, and my pleas for help had been ignored, and… well, the parents screamed bloody murder and the nurse, who had been wondering why I had never shown up, also read the riot act to everyone.
After that, “Can I go to the nurse?” was no longer ignored, I was allowed to carry 1 dose of benadryl with me at all times (I guess the reasoning was that 1 dose wouldn’t kill anyone, just make her sleepy), and I think epi-girl got to carry her injector with her after that. I didn’t know any kids with asthma there, but presumably they reconsidered allowing the kids to carry their inhalers with them.
Looking back I’m a little surprise they just didn’t forbid us all from camping - back then it would have been legal to exclude us for needing medication or being “sick”. I’m not sure if things have improved or not. I hope so, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the pendulum has swung to a different extreme.
