Adequate My Foot

Three students collapse during school run -- one in ICU

Straits Times, 3 March 2005

Three students from Hwa Chong Institution collapsed while taking part in a school cross-country run and had to be taken to hospital.

One of them, a 14-year-old in Secondary 2, fainted 45 minutes after the run started last Friday and was warded in the National University Hospital's intensive care unit (ICU) for heat stroke.

The institute's principal and chief executive officer, Mr Ang Wee Hiong, told The Straits Times that the boy was sent to the ICU because he had lost consciousness.

The other two, a 17-year-old girl and an 18-year-old boy, both in their A-level year, were warded for heat exhaustion. They were discharged two days later, on Sunday.

They were among 4,500 secondary school and junior college students who took part in the annual event, which this year required the students to run 3.6km at Turf City, the old Bukit Timah race course, last Friday afternoon. The run was held there as the place could accommodate the large number of youngsters participating.

This is the first time all the students from the institute's six levels, comprising the former The Chinese High School and Hwa Chong Junior College, took part in the run.

Said a JC 2 student, who didn't want to be named: "When we did the run at MacRitchie Reservoir last year, it was much cooler."

"Turf City is mostly concrete, and running there under the hot sun was overwhelming."

The highest temperature that afternoon was 34 degrees Celsius.

Mr Ang said the school took "adequate precautions" before and during the event. "We had two ambulances on standby and water stations along the route. All the students were also told before the run that they should stop if they feel tired."

Eyewitnesses said the boy who fainted was a good runner, and was on the last leg of the race when he started to stumble. Mr Ang said the boy had two brain scans to make sure that the fall had not resulted in any blood clots in his brain.

The boy's mother said he is in stable condition.

Alright, somebody tell me how many water stations there were exactly. The guys did not run 3.6km, they did 1km more. Precautions? What about being "operationally ready", to borrow SAFspeak. Last Friday, these three weren't the only ones who collapsed. There were those who fainted and had to wait more than 30 minutes for an ambulance to arrive. And guess what the very helpful SJAB guys did in the meantime? Stare.

How did these guys ever pass their First Aid? Didn't someone brief them to be ready for heat exhaustion cases? Why weren't they armed with icepacks and umbrellas? What did they expect they would be required to do? The Heimlich Manoeuvre? Make arm slings? Apparently, nobody read the news about bushfires all over Singapore and the below-average rainfall in February. It's probably a mere correlation that the more time you spend in air-conditioned comfort, the less common sense you have.

I could go on and on about what was wrong with the event. But I shall end on a positive note since nobody died -- things definitely could have been much worse if a certain sister school had been part of the logistics nightmare. Phew.