The Ministry of Health proposed to transfer certificates for admission to physical education online

But disclosure of information about a child’s health violates the protection of personal data

The discussion about how best to come to physical education with a certificate from a medical institution to guarantee the student’s health was continued by Mikhail Murashko. The Minister of Health proposed making the receipt of such a certificate electronic if the child regularly undergoes medical examinations and preventive examinations.

The head of the health department made this statement at a meeting of the Council for the Development of Physical Education and Sports. A number of questions immediately arose about the idea. For example, some schoolchildren and their parents are covered by voluntary health insurance or temporary insurance policies – what to do in this case? Will they accept certificates and epicrises from commercial clinics?

The question is not idle: in order to “enter” a kindergarten, we need a certificate exclusively from the municipal clinic. And you can bring a “uniform” to school from a private one.

However, electronic admission to “physical education” is still only an idea – Murashko emphasized that now it is necessary to create a mechanism for its implementation. “A measure such as simplifying the possibility of obtaining medical admission to physical education and sports, including online,” is proposed for adoption in 2024. So that our population can “play sports, and not go for certificates and papers,” the head of the department added to his vision of the situation.

Meanwhile, the letter from the Ministry of Health “On the procedure for admitting minors to physical education classes” appeared back in June of this year. And in the summer, the most important thing was done – changes were made to two federal laws, on health care and on education.

According to the ministry’s letter, a doctor from a clinic, based on those same preventive examinations, must not only issue certificates, paper or electronic, but also assign the child a health group. In accordance with which, a schoolchild should receive physical activity at school.

Previously, MK already wrote about incidents in the Volgograd region and Perm region, where the reports of ministries and departments were taken too literally. And already in September, at the beginning of the new school year, they began to demand a certificate “for physical education.” In one case, even a certificate of non-contact with Covid-19 patients is a sin. But the overwhelming majority of children still go to physical education.

Meanwhile, the reason for the “reference” story was the repeated cases of not only injuries, but also deaths of children in schools after physical education classes. At the peak of the spring-summer discussion of deaths in school physical education, the Ministry of Education shared shocking statistics: in 2016, 211 children died in physical education.

The running and warm-up were especially outstanding. In the last school year 2022-2023, several schoolchildren died on them. In Kopeisk, Chelyabinsk region, a 9th grade student died right on the treadmill. In the Novosibirsk region – a second grader, during a warm-up in class. In Novosibirsk itself, a 2nd grade student died after losing consciousness during exercises in the pool – the child quickly went under the water and adults did not immediately notice it. In the Moscow district of Perovo, a 15-year-old teenager died after a physical education lesson…

Therefore, the decree on a new procedure for admitting children to physical education classes at school was signed by the president as a separate legislative act in June of this year.

“I don’t know what technical difficulties clinics have that they still don’t issue these certificates,” says lawyer Vladimir Poletaev. – For my part, I see a double collision already at school. There, medical offices, as you know, have been abolished; there are nurses who come, as a rule. Several school buildings are gathered under one number, and there is one nurse for all of them. There are no senior health workers in schools, with rare exceptions. And diagnoses in medical institutions are encrypted with alphanumeric codes. This is ICD-10, the international codifier of diseases. Well, who at school will decipher all this? Moreover, only the doctor has the right to decipher the diagnosis.

And also an article of the federal law “On the fundamentals of protecting the health of citizens of the Russian Federation,” which is called “Compliance with medical confidentiality.” And the whole federal law on personal data. Nothing has changed about them. Over the summer, there was some movement on the topic of equipping all physical education teachers in schools with lifeguard certification, and requiring parents to inform schools about their child’s life-threatening illnesses. And even about some kind of “pedagogical secret”, by analogy with a medical one. But we talked and forgot. The law has not canceled the observance of medical confidentiality and non-disclosure of personal data.