Go Ask Alice…

Managing Student Medications on School Excursions

One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small And the ones that mother gives you, don't do anything at all

If you haven’t worked it out, you should go and play "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane. It’s a cool song and suitably trippy for this article. Before I explain it to death, this week, we’re talking about drugs.

Today, there’s no shortage of them. Students are on just about everything you can imagine: to get them moving, to slow them down, to fight bacteria, to promote bacteria. It’s a wonderful world of pharmaceuticals in every schoolbag.

The Teacher's Burden: From Educator to Unofficial Pharmacist

While these medication decisions are entirely up to parents and their doctors, teachers get lumped with the huge responsibility of administering them on school camps and trips. In my experience, most teachers are ill-equipped and lack the confidence to do this properly.

Even though it’s often a simple process, it can be overwhelming amidst everything else that’s going on. One distraction on a camp can lead to another, and while every teacher is trying their best to manage, sometimes things slip through the cracks. This is a massive challenge in school excursion risk management.

A Case Study in Chaos: The Missed Medication

I found this out the hard way on one camp where we had a lot of students requiring daily medications. It wasn’t until one teacher forgot a student’s ADHD medication one morning that the problem became horribly apparent. If you can imagine Bart Simpson on steroids, that’s pretty much what the student turned into. It didn’t make for a good day. It was just containment and damage control for thirteen hours until bedtime. It’s not something I ever want to go through again.

The Solution: Moving from Memory to a System

So, how did I solve this "slipping through the cracks" problem? I built an app to remind teachers when medications were due. It triggered alerts, provided a simple checkbox with the right medication for the right student, and time-stamped the administration. This became a core feature of the Xcursion platform and is now one of its most frequently used functions.

Effective risk management training for teachers must cover the legal and ethical responsibilities of this task. But training alone isn't enough without a robust system to manage the complexity of multiple medications for multiple students on multi-day sports tours and activities.

That's where school excursion risk assessment software comes in. A system like Xcursion Planner ensures that despite the tidal wave of medications coming your way, you can plan for and manage the risks and be confident that every pill gets to every student that needs it, on time, every time.

If you don't have a way of tracking this and instead decide to go chasing rabbits, you know you're going to fall. The best defence when things go wrong is to tell 'em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call. Just ask Alice, when she's ten feet tall…