Students who have been hospitalised for asthma are less likely to finish Year 12, a new study has revealed.
The study, by researchers from Macquarie University, found both boys and girls who were hospitalised for asthma had a significantly higher risk of not finishing Year 11 or 12, but there were some interesting variations between the genders when it came to how they performed leading up to graduation.
“For boys, that translates into a 13% higher risk of not achieving the national minimum standard for numeracy when compared to their peers, and a 15% higher risk of not achieving the NMS for literacy,” Associate Professor Rebecca Mitchell, of the Australian Institute of Health Innovation at Macquarie University, said.
“When it came to completing high school, young men had a 51% higher risk of not finishing Year 10, and a 20% higher risk of not completing Year 11 or Year 12.”
Assoc/Prof Mitchell said while girls showed no difference in literacy or numeracy results or in Year 10 completion rates compared to their peers, there was a significant difference at Year 11 and 12 level.
These results of the University’s study come shortly after the release of another study led by Assoc/Prof Mitchell that found children who had been hospitalised for an injury were almost twice as likely as their peers to not finish high school.
For both studies, the research team used linked birth, health and education records in NSW from 2005 to 2018 to analyse NAPLAN assessment tests and high school completion for young people aged 18 and under who had been hospitalised.
Improvements needed in risk management
Assoc/Prof Mitchell said hospitalisation is a red flag that asthma isn’t being managed as well as it could be.
“Young women had a 21% higher risk of not completing Year 11, and a 33% higher risk of not completing Year 12,” she said.
Asthma specialists recommend developing management plans for children with asthma, but the Macquarie University CareTrack Kids study in 2018 found there was a fairly limited uptake of this advice.
“Care plans have been shown to work and could be being enacted for more children,” Assoc/Prof Mitchell said.
“When they’re not, we can see here the potential effect on academic performance – and the potential ongoing effect on their lives due to reduced employment opportunities.”
Room for improvement
On average, the children hospitalised for asthma spent a total of eight days as inpatients across three visits.
“This makes two significant studies from Macquarie into children with asthma, and both show in different ways that their care needs to be improved,” Assoc/Prof Mitchell said.
“While this latest research analysed outcomes for children hospitalised with asthma, there is still the potential for future research to investigate the reason behind these outcomes.”
Assoc/Prof Mitchell said she is keen to further investigate early intervention strategies for asthma management and look at getting in early at the preventive stage rather than waiting for these poor performance flags to begin to appear.
“Peer support, supplementary programs and extra tutoring could all be of benefit here,” she said.
“We need to be doing everything we can to ensure children who have been hospitalised for illness or injury have the same chance of achieving basic numeracy and literacy standards and finishing high school and going on to tertiary study as their peers.”