From Health magazine
Remember the school nurse parked in that office down the linoleum hallway? How times have changed. Laurie Feldkamp, RN, a 30-year nursing veteran in the Dearborn, Michigan, public schools, barely sits down from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m., as she races among her eight schools and 4,000 students. Yes, 4,000 students.
Feldkamp is hardly the exception. Her caseload is slightly better than Michigan’s state average (one nurse to 4,204 students) and far better than the average in Utah, where there is currently one nurse for every 4,893 pupils. With a national student body that’s in dire need of support (13 percent are overweight or obese, 13 percent take long-term prescription medication, 12 percent have asthma, and the list goes on), “We’ve never needed school nurses more,” says Amy Garcia, RN, MSN, executive director of the National Association of School Nurses.
The problem? No nationally mandated ratio. This creates a gross disparity among states. (Vermont leads the nation with one nurse for every 275 students.) Carolyn McCarthy, herself a nurse and a sixth-term representative from Long Island, New York, is trying to fix the problem: She has introduced a bill that will fund states’ efforts to reduce their ratios. Meanwhile, Laurie Feldkamp keeps on trying to care for 4,000 kids a day.
Additional Reporting by Brittani Tingle
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Comments (4)
I work as a school nurse where we have 1 nurse for over every 3000 students. I have heard many times from staff, principals, parents and the students themselves that they wish they could have a full-time school nurse. Unfortunately, the decision to fund school nurses is not up to them and with no minimum required ratio of school nurses to student, many school districts fund only to meet the bare minimum. The result is unlicensed personnel with little or no medical background being mandated to care for children for everything from medical emergencies to illnesses to medication administration, and to determine if a child’s injury or illness is serious enough to require a call to the parents or emergency medical services. I have learned about children who suffered an injury on my day away from my school who have had a serious injury that would have been referred to see a physician if they had been assessed by a nurse. Instead, the staff at the school did the best they could to assess the injury and mistakenly determined it wasn’t as serious as it was. In one case, a child with a concussion rode the bus for an hour home where her mother then carried her off the bus and took her to the emergency room. Teachers are trained to teach, secretaries are trained in their specific job requirements and nurses are trained to save lives-every child deserves to have a licensed qualified teacher to teach them and a licensed qualified nurse to care for their medical needs-whatever those medical needs may be. I urge anyone who now has or will have a child they love in school to support The school nurse to student ratio improvement act of 2008 by contacting their congressman. Congress will be considering it soon. Our children are our most valuable resource, shouldn’t we care for them the best we can? Someday, they will be caring for us.
It is an excellent idea to have a nationally mandated ratio for school nurses. The same epidemic is happening with school counselors. The recommended student to counselor ratio is 250:1, but states like California have a 900:1 ratio, with some counselors having over 5,000 kids a piece! A nationally mandated ratio for nurses and counselors would go a long way in helping our students to succeed. =)
Does anyone see anything wrong with this problem.? There isn’t enough time in the day, and they don’t pay these nurses what they are worth. A current school nurse has to be very skilled between the amount of children on medications, inhalers, trach suctioning, diabetic testing, plus all the screenings these nurses, should be paid a million dollars. This is a law suit waiting to happen if our nurse who takes care of 4000 children can’t get to that student who might have an attack ie cardiac, respiratory, seisures, falls, allergic reaction or a simple broken bone. 900 students to one school nurse is outrageous too.
new to site. no comments at present