At 0-2-5 Nursery Ltd we promote good health of all children attending, including oral health, by:
- Asking parents to keep children at home if they are unwell. If a child is unwell, it is in their best interest to be in a home environment rather than at nursery with their peers.
- Asking staff and other visitors not to attend the setting if they are unwell.
- Helping children to keep healthy by providing balanced and nutritious snacks, meals, and drinks.
- Minimising infection through our rigorous cleaning and hand washing processes, and ensuring children have regular access to the outdoors and having good ventilation inside.
- Sharing information with parents about the importance of the vaccination programme for young children to help protect them and the wider society from communicable diseases.
- Sharing information from the Department of Health that all children aged 6 moths – 5 years should take a daily vitamin.
- Having areas for rest and sleep where required, and sharing information about the importance of sleep and how many hours young children should be having.
Our procedures
To take appropriate action of children who become ill and to minimise the spread of infection we implement the following procedures:
- If a child becomes ill during the nursery day, we contact their parent(s)/carer and ask them to pick up their child as soon as possible. During this time, we care for the child in a quiet, calm area with their key person (wearing PPE), wherever possible.
- We follow the guidance published by Public Health England (Health Protection in Schools and other childcare facilities) and advice from out local health protection unit on exclusion times for specific illnesses, e.g., sickness and diarrhoea, measles, and chicken pox, to protect other children in the nursery.
- Should a child have an infectious disease, such as sickness and diarrhoea, they must not return to the nursery until they have been clear for at least 48 hours.
- We inform all parents if there is a contagious infection identified in the nursery, to enable them to spot the early signs of the illness. We thoroughly clean and sterilise all equipment and resources that may have come into contact with a contagious child to reduce the spread of infection.
- We notify Ofsted as soon as is reasonably practical, but in any event within 14 days of the incident of any food poisoning affecting two or more children cared for on the premises.
- We ask parents to keep children on antibiotics at home for the first 48 hours of the course (unless this is part of an ongoing care plan to treat individual medical conditions e.g. asthma and the child is not unwell). This is because it is important that children are not subjected to the rigours the nursery day, which requires socialising with other children and being part of a group setting, when they have first become ill and require a course of antibiotics.
- We have the right to refuse admission to a child who is unwell. This decision will be taken by the manager on duty and is non-negotiable.
- We make information/posters about head lice readily available, and all parents are requested to regularly check their children’s hair. If a parent find that their child has head lice, we would be grateful if they could inform the nursery so that other parents can be alerted to check their child’s hair.