Medical Directorship
for Schools
Dr. Marie Jean-Baptiste, DO, MA
Your nurse is making physician-level decisions every day. This is the program that puts a board-certified pediatrician behind her.
The Question Most Schools Cannot Answer
Who, specifically, signs off
on your standing orders?
If you paused reading that, you are not alone. Most private schools, including excellent ones with strong nursing staff, operate without a designated supervising physician.
Your nurse makes clinical judgment calls without a named physician backing those protocols. If something goes wrong, who authorised the protocol becomes a legal question very quickly.
Most school health handbooks were written years ago by non-clinical staff and inherited by each new administration. Allergy, concussion and infectious disease guidance have all moved since.
Teachers and front-office staff are asked several times a week to make calls they were never trained to make. Send home or keep in class is a clinical decision landing on non-clinical people.
School nurses are doing extraordinary work under difficult conditions. The gap is structural. Asking one RN to carry physician-level accountability alone is a system design failure, not a staffing one.
What Is Included
What changes when a
physician is in place.
Five things, and they are felt at every level of the building.
Signed protocols for the medications and emergencies your nurse is most likely to encounter, authored by a board-certified pediatrician. She stops carrying that authority alone.
A yearly clinical audit of your health handbook, flagging any section that has drifted from current standards. Allergy protocols, concussion guidance and infectious disease policy have all moved recently.
Your Head of School reaches me directly for the questions that cannot wait, and has a named clinical advisor to cite for the questions that surface at board meetings.
A yearly session covering the protocols and decision points your staff actually face in real time, so the "is this contagious" call stops being guesswork.
Families know from the moment they enroll that the school they chose has a physician overseeing health on campus. In a market where parents compare programs feature by feature, that is not a small thing.
Why I built this
Schools either could not afford a full-time staff physician, or did not know a part-time clinical partnership was an option.
I kept watching the same gap go unaddressed in conversation after conversation with private school leaders. Very few schools can fund a full-time physician, and most had never been told there was anything in between that and nothing at all. So I designed something in between. I hold a Master of Arts in Bioethics alongside my medical degree, which matters here more than it might sound: the questions a school faces about consent, confidentiality, duty of care and where a school's responsibility ends are ethical questions as much as clinical ones.
Let us look at your standing orders together
No obligation and no pitch deck. I will walk you through the structure, look at what you currently have in place, and answer your questions. If your school is already covered, I will tell you that. Read more about my background.
Schedule a ConversationRising Star Pediatrics · West Palm Beach, FL · (561) 516-9471