The Importance of the Health Form - Keeping Your Child Safe!

One of my responsibilities at People to People Ambassador Programs is to manage and provide leadership to the medical team. The medical team is composed of highly trained individuals responsible for collecting a health form from every single delegate planning to travel on one of our many life-changing programs. The health form is a simple but important two-sided document that allows parents and guardians to alert our medical team to any condition students might have that could impact their ability to participate in and enjoy the experiences of our programs. The health form is submitted to the medical team soon after participants enroll to ensure all health issues can be addressed in a timely manner prior to traveling.

While a student is on program, that same health form is carried by the program leader. In the event a student becomes ill and needs to be taken to a medical professional, the health form will provide the treating medical professional with medical information to effectively treat the student.

The medical form requests full disclosure of all health and medical conditions including but not limited to health and mobility limitations, hearing or vision impairments, allergies, diabetes, etc. The parent/guardian is asked to fully explain any health, medical, or mobility conditions or limitations and notify the medical team of all medications the student requires to control the conditions, along with emergency contact information. The health form also requires the parent/guardian to acknowledge and agree to important disclosures. These agreed disclosures serve several purposes and allow People to People Ambassador Programs associates and leaders to seek medical treatment for the student in the event such treatment is needed while a student is on the program. The parent/guardian also consents and authorizes the treating physician to share important information with our program office and with the leaders in the field. Having this authorization allows us to promptly communicate factual information with the student’s parent/guardian (or designated emergency contacts in the event a parent/guardian is unavailable).

The health form explains the importance of disclosing all health and medical conditions or information to our medical team. The reason is very simple—if we clearly understand a student’s health or medical condition in advance, our organization will be more successful in providing the best possible program for the traveler. Full disclosure of all health and medical conditions by the parent/guardian in advance increases our ability to reasonably accommodate the student’s health and medical needs.

At People to People Ambassador Programs, we pride ourselves on our ability to provide reasonable accommodations as required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). In 2009, we increased the number of reasonable accommodations made from 2008, which means that many more students can have access to a life-changing experience, including those who may not have had the opportunity with other organizations in the past.

One of the ways we keep up to date on the latest ADA laws is by annually inviting our friends and colleagues from the Disability and Business Technical Assistance Center (DBTAC) to our Spokane headquarters. For the past two years, this group of ADA specialists from the University of Washington campus in Mountlake Terrace, Washington, has traveled to Spokane to provide our organization with the most up-to-date training available on ADA laws and requirements. Last year, we trained more than 20 key associates who are responsible for establishing program venues and content as well as dealing directly with families requesting reasonable accommodations. Of course, we also trained the leadership team responsible for the management of our vast network of leaders. Next month, the DBTAC will make its annual trip to Spokane to provide this year’s training, just in time to cover some of the ADA laws that were expanded or changed in 2009.

In addition to ADA training, we also provide HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1999) training and certification to the key individuals who have access to confidential medical information. The privacy rules contained within HIPAA provide federal protections for personal health information held by covered entities and give patients an array of rights with respect to that information. At the same time, the privacy rules are balanced so that they permit the disclosure of personal health information needed for patient care and other important purposes.

People to People Ambassador Programs is not held to the rigorous standards of HIPAA by any agency, as we are not a medical-service provider nor do we charge for medical services. But we do believe the confidentiality of your child’s medical information is vitally important, and therefore we voluntarily have elected to meet and implement HIPAA standards and requirements. Accessibility to all medical information is limited to just those associates who have a reason to know the information. Each employee with this access, including me, has been certified in HIPAA Privacy and Security Training by Supremus Group. What this means to you is that the information you share with our organization will be kept confidential and protected.

In short, we have a very comprehensive medical-health review process in place that is designed to ensure the safety and health of all delegates while they are on one of our programs. But our ability to effectively manage this program relies on the information shared on the medical health form. If your child needs a reasonable accommodation, our highly trained medical team will do all in their power to develop a plan that is right for your child.

As always, I wish you all safe travels and a healthy life!

Mike

Safety Measures for Swine-Flu-Free Experiences in Washington, D.C.

Yesterday we reached out to the families of all our delegates traveling with us on one of our fall World Leadership Forum programs in Washington, D.C.

The safety of all our delegates is our number-one priority. To that end, we are prepared to aggressively control the risk of the influenza virus impacting any of our delegates, and I’d like to share with you how we are achieving that goal.

Usually, we see a small number (generally 4-6) of students who arrive at our leadership forums with some form of virus. Each program consists of several hundred students, so it is a very small percentage that arrives at a program ill. People to People ensures these students receive prompt care by one of the many medical facilities in the D.C. area. They are also attended to by individual People to People associates assigned to monitor their conditions and personal needs as they recover. We have found that students who arrive ill on our programs almost always had symptoms at home prior to travel.

I experienced this firsthand on my first World Leadership Forum last fall when a young man experienced shallow breathing, fatigue, and other symptoms upon arrival at the program. He was immediately seen by a medical professional on site, and then he and I headed to the hospital via ambulance. The diagnosis was early-stage pneumonia, a condition he had developed several days prior to departing for our program.

I spent the next two nights sleeping in a chair in his room while the doctors cared for the student, as it is our policy to never leave a student alone in a medical facility. Fortunately, we caught the condition early and were able to immediately get this student the medical attention he so needed, and he was able to rejoin the rest of the delegation for the remainder of the program once we were assured he was no longer contagious and was fit to participate in the many activities planned.

I share this story with you to give you some insight into how we protect your student from exposure to viruses and other conditions that some students unknowingly bring onto our programs. With the media coverage surrounding swine flu and the potential for contracting influenza A as students come together, we thought you should know we are taking steps to ensure your child’s health and safety.

The question most often asked by parents during the enrollment process is always “How will People to People ensure the safety of my child?” The answer is that we are proactive with many programs, procedures, and safeguards in place to ensure the risk of any problem is reduced as much as possible. Our program this fall for our World Leadership Forum in Washington, D.C., is just one example of our attention to detail in this matter.

Yesterday we sent an email to every family of delegates traveling to Washington, D.C., during the next three weeks. We will also contact the remaining delegations as we get closer to their departure dates. In these emails, we disclose our plans to prevent any student from contracting influenza A while on our program. This program is very similar to the successful steps we took to ensure no delegate traveled internationally this summer with the H1N1 virus.

The U.S. government no longer tests for swine flu or H1N1 due to the volume of cases already reported, the difficulty in tracking such a high volume, and the cost of the individual tests. Instead, a quick blood test can yield results within 30 minutes that will determine if a patient has influenza A. If this test is positive, it is assumed that the patient has the H1N1 virus.

In our email, we ask if anyone in the family has experienced any of the following symptoms:

• High fever above 100.4 degrees F
• Coughing or sneezing
• Sore throat
• Body aches
• Chills and fatigue
• Diarrhea and vomiting

If their child shows the above symptoms the day prior to travel, we advise the family not to send their child on the program. Instead, we provide many options, one of which includes transferring the delegate to another fall 2009 or spring 2010 program without penalty.

We also advise the families that it is our intent to take the temperatures of each student using a nonintrusive scanner prior to acceptance into our programs. Those few who show significant symptoms will be immediately escorted to a medical professional for evaluation. If they test positive for influenza A, the student will be cared for away from the rest of the delegation and will rejoin the group 48 hours after symptoms have subsided.

We do not anticipate that many students will need to be escorted to a medical facility. Instead, we believe that being proactive and up-front with all families in advance will discourage those few with a sick child from sending them on the program, further ensuring the health and safety of the majority of students who arrive healthy and ready to participate in their life-changing experiences.

I share with you our safety measures not to scare you but to reassure you that our team here at People to People cares deeply about your child and will do all that we can to help them proceed with their great adventure.

With that, I wish you all safe travels and a healthy life.

Mike

Time to hit the road and learn!

Now that the 2009 summer travel season has come to a close, it’s time to focus our attention on the 2010 season. Each year we dive deep into the detail of the past season to draw out lessons learned, best practices, and detailed information that will be transferred into action plans that enable us to continually enhance our safety practices. Although 2009 was a great season, like all responsible organizations, we must never rest on our success, but continually seek new and innovative ways to improve our systems and processes. One of the ways we accomplish that objective is to participate in industry conferences designed to share ideas and concepts with other educational travel providers.

Tomorrow I will depart for Norfolk, VA to attend the Student Youth Travel Association’s (SYTA) Annual Conference. The SYTA Conference is considered the premier event for the student and youth travel market. The Conference provides educational growth and information sharing to help companies involved with student travel improve themselves and the products and services they provide.

SYTA is the non-profit, professional trade association that promotes student & youth travel and seeks to foster integrity and professionalism among student and youth travel service providers. SYTA also maintains and is guided by an Educational Advisory Board comprised of representatives from organizations such as the Canadian Association of Principals, National Association of Music Education, National Association of Secondary School Principals, National Association of State Boards of Education, National Middle School Association, and the National School Boards Association.

By participating in this conference, we are able to learn and share best industry practices and also help shape future policies and regulations that will impact the Educational Travel Industry.
Attending this year’s conference with me will be Shannon Scheiwiller, the Senior Director of Leadership Programs. Shannon is also a nominee to the Board of Directors for SYTA. Shannon is responsible for our leadership development programs in prominent centers of history and learning—including Washington, D.C., London, Brussels, Paris, and top American universities. Students from grades 5-12 come from all over the world to hone their leadership skills, prepare for college, and explore future careers through unique access to extraordinary people, places, and insights.

I will also participate in the leadership of this organization this year by serving on the Professional Development Committee. This committee will evaluate Travel Accreditation Programs, Certified Student Travel Professional Programs, and Supplier Certification programs. All are designed to ensure the highest standards of safety and excellence of the operators we associate with. I’m excited about this opportunity.

On October 13th, I will be the keynote speaker on best practices for the handling of swine flu. This will be an Educational Conference Call sponsored by SYTA and offered to all members. I will share our successes in the handling of swine flu exposure to help other organizations successfully react to this disease as the nation continues to develop its pandemic response. Our experiences in China uniquely qualify our organization for leading this event as we did not have a single case of swine flu in China during the travel season due to the proactive steps we took in preparing our associates, students, parents, and leaders for travel.

I will provide more information on the scheduled conference call and the information shared as the date grows closer. I also plan to highlight lessons learned at this conference in my blog next week so please come back to view them.

If you would like more information about SYTA please go to SYTA.com or you may contact them directly at the address or phone number listed below.

SYTA Office
Student & Youth Travel Association
8400 Westpark Drive, 2nd Floor
McLean, VA 22102-5116
Tel: 703-610-1263

With that, it’s time for me to pack my bag and hit the road. As always, I wish you all safe travels and a healthy life!

Mike

It’s now official; all students are home safe and sound

On Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 11:11 am you could hear a pin drop around the People to People program office here in Spokane, Washington. Moments later, the silence turned into an eruption of high-fives, cheers, and celebration. Why the sudden change in emotion? Well, at 11:12 am, Flight 62 from Narita to Los Angeles arrived 12 minutes early which marked the return of our final summer student delegation to U.S. soil for the 2009 season.

This also marked the beginning of the end for our On-Call team. I say the beginning of the end because they are still on guard until every single student and leader is home safely to their families. Since May 31 when our first delegation departed the U.S., the On-Call team has been manning the phones in our Delegate Support Call Center 24/7. That is 75 straight days covering over 1,800 continuous hours by dedicated associates on standby and communicating throughout the summer with family members who have relatives traveling with us.

As you can imagine, we receive thousands of calls during our peak summer travel season. This year, our call number topped out at 4,154 calls. The greatest number of calls this summer into our support network where classified “medical minor”. These are inbound calls from a teacher leader traveling with a student delegation. The majority of these calls were to let our team know that a student had a sore throat, a minor fever, or even an upset stomach. Once we receive that call, we immediately document the details in what we refer to as an incident report. With this incident report in hand, our On-Call team jumps into action. The team’s first and foremost priority is to immediately contact the family of the student and explain the situation. In many cases, the teacher leader has already phoned the parents to reassure them that the medical situation is a minor one and their child is being cared for. If there is any doubt to the severity of the situation, the teacher leader along with our on-site manager will quickly transport the student to a local hospital or clinic to get medical attention.

When we call home, most all parents thank us for contacting them and express appreciation for keeping them informed. On a rare occasion we do get a parent who has been awakened by our call in the middle of the night and feels we may have taken our parent notification policy a little far, but that’s okay with us. We prefer to respond immediately to inform family members about their child’s situation regardless of what time it is.

For our On-Call team it doesn’t end there. The team meets in our Command Center every morning at 8:30 am and again at 4:30 pm seven days a week. Representatives from each department are present to get an update report and handle all issues that fall into their area of expertise. Another purpose of this meeting is to ensure that someone is assigned to every single open incident and to take personal responsibility to make certain that all required follow-up is timely and accurately completed.

The second largest call volume each summer comes from lonely parents calling to ask us to contact their son or daughter and remind them to call home. In most cases, once a student begins our program, meets new friends, and takes part in life changing experiences, they get so wrapped up in all the happenings that they forget to check-in with mom and dad. These requests also go into incident reports and are tracked until we have confirmed with the parent that the student has made the call home.

I don’t want you to believe that we don’t deal with some serious events during the summer travel season, because we do. However, whether the incidents are major or minor in nature, we handle every situation with the same group of dedicated professionals and follow our safety protocols.

Ultimately, I am personally responsible for the On-Call team here at People to People and for preparing our associates to handle any situation. In the coming months, we will complete our review of the summer season. We will make the needed adjustments to our procedures and training methods so that in 2010 this team will continue to look for ways to improve and raise our travel safety standards.

As an organization, we are all committed to ongoing improvement and are highly focused on our ultimate goal, to ensure that no student, leader, or associate, ever comes in harm’s way. That’s my purpose and my passion here at People to People.

Here's wishing you safe travels and a healthy life!

Mike

Another Safe Summer Travel Season Comes to a Close

Here we are again with another summer coming to a close. As our final travelers head home from their journeys, it’s a perfect time to launch my regular travel safety blog. What I want to accomplish with my new blog is to talk about travel safety and the many ways safety impacts travel, trends, learnings, and also to establish open communications with you.

This summer has been full of some unique challenges. I’m happy to say that we have risen to all of them, and learned a lot in the process. This summer was all about moving quickly to manage the Swine Flu (H1N1) and eventual pandemic along with the very individual ways different countries responded to it. We at People to People Ambassadors Programs had a very significant China program this year, our groups were traveling through China all summer. The Chinese government in general, had the most aggressive response to the pandemic of any major country, holding anyone with a raised body temperature for as much as 24 hours in a hospital or placing in quarantine for up to seven days anyone who may have been exposed to the illness depending on where they sat on the plane. More than one People to People group was impacted this summer. See our web site for People to People’s response and my regular messages on the subject at http://www.peopletopeople.com/alerts/Pages/swine-flu.aspx.

One of the most important things to do in a situation like the H1N1 pandemic is to maintain open channels of communication. Here are some of the procedures we immediately put into place to ensure that we did just that:

• We immediately sent a senior team to China to make sure we had staff on the ground to ensure the health and safety of our student ambassadors; I headed out to China immediately myself to access the situation prior to our first student delegation arriving.
  
• We immediately contacted the U.S. Embassy in China and worked with them throughout the summer.
  
• We contacted all parents of students traveling to China at least 7 to 14 days in advance of their student’s program to complete a questionnaire and ensure we never sent a student exposed to, or with H1N1.
  
• We immediately alerted all parents of anyone taken into quarantine or secondary screening at the hospital and maintained a 24-hour staff here in Spokane, which is standard procedure for the organization every travel season.
  
• Each family with a quarantined student was assigned a specific Family Liaison Team member who they could contact 24 hours a day for any need they might have.
  
• We alerted all parents with students traveling in the China program as to what was happening with the quarantine situation as it evolved.
  
• We provided the quarantined students with laptops and cell phones so that they could keep in touch back home and let everyone know they were fine and to keep the lines of communication open.
  
• Daily care packages were brought into the quarantine hotel to make sure the students had something to do, and brighten their day. I personally brought games, candy and other items in right away. We had so many gifts that the generous students shared with other people under quarantine!
  

Our leaders are world class! While not required to be there by the Chinese government, our leaders all volunteered to be quarantined to ensure the health and well-being of our students. In addition, nine other leaders volunteered to be placed with the 15 students who were taken to a local hospital for secondary screening.

Even though Chinese officials promised that we would always be able to have a student accompanied by a leader, in one case at a hospital used for the first time by the government they didn’t keep that promise. One of our leaders stayed directly outside the door to the quarantined student’s room to make sure that only the medical staff was entering. This leader is a great example of the level of commitment to the students of our extraordinary adults who lead People to People programs.

Beyond the international incident we tackled over the summer with the H1N1 virus, we also had one that was more of a personal nature. One unexpected incident that we handled this summer had to do with the brief disappearance of one of our students while in Paris, France. This student chose deliberately to slip away from the delegation to “explore independently.” As parents and delegates know, small-group exploration for short periods is a free-time activity for our older students only and much of the reason for our pre-travel screening of students; whether at home or abroad, teens need to make good decisions, follow the rules, and listen to those in charge. In this instance we did everything we could to ensure this student’s safety as quickly as possible:

• We made contact with the student’s parents within an hour of the student intentionally leaving the hotel.
  
• A citywide APB was put out within 2 hours.
  
• We involved the U.S. Embassy, FBI, Paris police, and U.S. police in the search.
  
• The Paris police requested a 24-hour period before the full search began, so we cooperated with the student’s parents instead to follow the student’s credit card use.
  
• We obtained photos of the student using the ATMs by herself and under no apparent distress.
  
• We sent staff to the locations where the card was being used to show photos of the student to the employees to see if anyone had seen the student.
  
• We sent the parents to get emergency passports.
  
• We arranged for the parents to be flown to Paris with a representative from our organization.
  
• Within 36 hours the student was reunited with the parents at the U.S. Embassy.
  
• The parents had their child formally apologize to our organization and the law officials for running away.
  
• The parents and student were returned to the U.S.
  

For other People to People parents, I want you to know that this type of concern and responsiveness are available to each and every student. We don’t just pay lip-service to the idea that our students’ safety is our first priority. We live it—in cases like these, on a moment-to-moment basis, with the care and concern nearly as great as that of the parents.

Though our first concern is always the safety of the student, it was gratifying to speak to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, where a representative told us that in 20 years she had never seen an incident like this better handled by an organization.

My sole focus at People to People, as well as that of my entire team, is to ensure the health and safety of every single delegate. We are very proud of our ability to do just that during the 2009 season, even with unexpected situations and unexpected choices from students. We continually improve our ability to expect the unexpected and be prepared for all situations. It’s why I’m here, the only person in the industry with my job title and description. And that’s why we are dedicated to being the leader in offering high-quality, safe educational adventures for thousands of students every year.

The summer has nearly come to an end for People to People Ambassador Programs, and what a summer it has been. We saw some fabulous People to People moments—including the return of a World War II battle flag to a Japanese widow. Moments like this are the very essence of People to People—bridging cultural and political borders, and making the world a better place for future generations.

Until next time - I’m wishing you safe and happy travels,

Mike