What if Every Child Got Screened?
What if every child received comprehensive healthcare simply by going to school?
In this episode of The Vitals, host Leslie Schlachter sits down with two esteemed guests—Dr. Rachel Vreeman, Director of the Arnhold Institute for Global Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Mount Sinai, and Dr. Ertenisa Hamilton, Director of Primary Health Care Services for Guyana's Ministry of Health—to discuss one of the world's most ambitious school-based health initiatives.
Together, Mount Sinai and the Government of Guyana are bringing comprehensive annual health screenings directly into classrooms—identifying vision, hearing, dental, developmental, mental health, and other concerns before they become lifelong challenges. The program has already screened more than 90,000 children and is helping reshape healthcare policy for an entire nation.
Dr. Ertenisa Hamilton: [00:00:00] You really need to identify what are the underlying factors for what you see as adults
Dr. Rachel Vreeman: I think it also creates this connection that we really are giving families what they need and, and in many ways helping with ... You know, they, everyone cares about their children the most, and- Yeah. Is
Dr. Ertenisa Hamilton: there any
Leslie Schlachter: cost to the families for this?
Dr. Ertenisa Hamilton: No cost to the family. No. It is all being taken care of by the government.
Dr. Rachel Vreeman: Fascinating
Leslie Schlachter: Hello, and welcome back to The Vitals, the Mount Sinai Health System's groundbreaking roundtable video podcast. I'm your host, Leslie Schlachter, a neurosurgery physician assistant here at the Mount Sinai Hospital. Today we're talking about a global perspective on child and adolescent health, and how one country is transforming care for young people at a national scale.
In Guyana, nearly forty percent of the population is under the age of eighteen. Until recently, many children did [00:01:00] not have access to routine health checkups beyond early childhood vaccines, but that's changing. The government of Guyana, with technical expertise from Mount Sinai, has adopted a nationwide school health screening program that's reaching children where they are, in the schools.
The program is not only improving individual health outcomes, it's generating data that informs national policy and helps build a modern, high-quality health system of the future. To talk more about this important work, we're joined by Dr. Rachel Vreeman and Dr. Ertinisa Hamilton. Welcome. Okay, so to kick us off, can you just tell me and our listeners how did Mount Sinai Health System get involved in this, in this project?
Dr. Rachel Vreeman: Well, in Mount Sinai's Global Health department, we really specialize in health system strengthening, and we had this incredible opportunity where we were invited by the Ministry of Health in Guyana and the government of Guyana to partner with them [00:02:00] in their efforts to grow Guyana's health system across the country on lots of different levels.