The increasing incidents of school shootings in recent years have resulted in America's students, teachers, and staff feeling vulnerable. The most effective approach to creating safe and supportive school environments requires a comprehensive, coordinated effort including school-wide, district-wide, and community-wide strategies. School nurses, healthcare partners embedded in school communities, can guide these efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSchool nurses from the Klein Independent School District in Harris County, Texas, have educated students, some as young as kindergarteners, on cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) and how to recognize and use automatic external defibrillators and provide basic first aid. Through a collaboration with community partners and CPR-certified high school students, these school nurses are empowering the next generation with lifesaving skills.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe complexity and demands of the school nurse role have changed greatly over time. Our aims included determining tasks and knowledge relevant to modern school nursing in the United States, identifying continuing education needs of school nurses, and describing anticipated changes to the professional role. A secondary analysis of a cross-sectional web-based survey of 750 school nurses was performed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Future of Nursing (FON) 2020-2030 will be an important roadmap for advancing the profession of nursing. The final FON document is meant to address nursing as a whole-not specific specialties-as well as address changes needed in the entire healthcare system that would facilitate patient safety and care. To ensure inclusion of the needs of school-age children and nurses employed outside the traditional hospital setting in the proceedings, the NASN offered comments at the first public meeting of the Committee on the Future of Nursing in March 2019 (Figure 1) and followed the other town hall meetings carefully.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis interview provides a practical example of how a school district appropriately shares data with outside partners. It is a practical example of how to apply the principles found in the article on data sharing, which is part of the "data and school nursing" articles series being published in NASN School Nurse during the 2018-2019 school year.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor Part 3 of the NASN School Nurse series exploring NASN's past, present, and future, Lindsey Minchella interviews NASN President, Nina Fekaris and President-elect, Laurie Combe to discuss their school nursing perspective and philosophies. These three school nursing leaders discuss what is responsible for their long tenure as school nurses, changes witnessed in student health over the years, how NASN makes a difference for students and school nurses, the future of school nursing, and the power of NASN members' voices to improve student health and academic outcomes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child model released in 2015 as a collaboration between associations focuses renewed attention on the importance of improved physical, emotional, and social health to student learning. The model replaces and expands upon the Coordinated School Health Model that has been widely implemented in schools since the late 1980s. NASN celebrates this new model and calls school nurses to action in advocating for the implementation of this model in their communities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNASN has found a lack of research-based evidence to support the caseload ratio model of school nurse staffing. In keeping with the practices of school administrators, other school support personnel, and community health care providers, NASN is transitioning to the workload model to guide safe school nurse staffing. The workload model considers more than ratio and acuity; instead, it provides a full description of school nurse activities and other influences on student health.
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