When a Murietta Valley Unified School District elementary student bit into a cupcake made with peanut butter in April, she quickly struggled to breathe. A school health aide grabbed a pre-loaded syringe of adrenaline from the supply cabinet, injected the girl and contained the girls' allergic reaction to peanuts until she got to the emergency room. This is exactly as a new California law intended –- but not, in fact, how the law is playing out in many districts.
Six months after the Jan. 1 law required schools to stock these pre-loaded syringes – known as epinephrine automatic injectors and considered the first line treatment for potentially life-threatening allergic reactions – many districts have been unable to obtain what Riverside County's Murietta Unified has: a doctor’s prescription for the devices.
Up and down the state, doctors have declined to write prescriptions for epinephrine auto-injectors for districts, citing liability concerns and derailing the promise of the law. A February survey of 408 school nurses by the California School Nurses Organization found that 57 percent had been unable to obtain epinephrine auto-injectors for their district, calling the inability to find a doctor to write a prescription a major obstacle.
Many districts have turned to city and county public health doctors as the logical prescription writers, only to be rebuffed. “They are being asked to sign these orders, but are being told by their county counsel and their risk managers that the liability risks are real,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California, a Sacramento-based membership group for city and county public health doctors.
The impasse has prompted the author of the law, state Sen. Robert Huff, R-Diamond Bar, to introduce follow-up legislation designed to protect physicians from prosecution if they write these prescriptions. The bill, Senate Bill 738, passed the Senate this month and is in the Assembly.