ESSAY : Community Health Nursing

The Role of a Nurse in a School Setting

Introduction

School nurses provide comprehensive health services as a result of escalating cases of students suffering from different acute/chronic health conditions. To effectively care for school children, appropriate staffing, ongoing education, and preparation of school nurses are critical elements for student success. The nurse serves as a critical pillar in early identification of problems, providing preventive services and interventions in order to foster educational, social, and health success. A healthy child can learn better and be more productive. As such, school nurses work to ensure that every child has access to equal educational opportunities regardless of their health status. A school nurse plays critical roles in a school setting including providing school children with direct care, developing plans for responding to emergencies, promoting a healthy environment for the school, liaison between the community, school staff, healthcare professionals and families, as well as providing referrals and screenings for health conditions (Holmes et al., 2016). The essay primarily focusses on analysing and describing the roles of a school nurse. In addition, the paper seeks to examine the best health promotion interventions that a nurse can implement as well as identifying the professional nursing organization that support the roles of a school nurse.

Community Settings Recently, medical care in childhood health has dramatically improved, reducing the causes of premature deaths and other severe conditions. Increase in evidence-based knowledge on children’s health has resulted in enhanced screening procedures, chronic diseases management, and preventive care. As such, children are increasingly surviving to school-age, where they would require the services of a school nurse. Even though advances in immunizations for infectious diseases have reduced…