School nursing: a real need

Abstract

In December 2019, a series of cases of hospitalized patients were reported with a new communicable disease, unknown until then, characterized mainly by the appearance of respiratory symptoms and pneumonia, caused by a new virus of the coronavirus family. The number of cases of this disease was progressively increasing and spreading to all countries of the world, despite the extensive containment measures put in place, so that on March 11, 2020, the WHO declared a pandemic situation.

This situation affected all spheres of society in a very relevant way, leaving none aside, with a tremendous influence on the child and adolescent population and a great repercussion in the educational and teaching field.

This meant that school nurses had to develop their work and act as intermediaries between two of the areas most affected by the pandemic: the health field, the backbone of the management of this situation, and the educational field, in which students and their families, on the one hand, and educators and other school workers, on the other, converge.

In schools where the figure of the school nurse was implemented, these professionals assumed from the beginning of the pandemic their work of support and guidance to families, serving as a bridge between families and health resources when at the beginning of the health crises schoolchildren presented symptoms compatible with COVID 19 and all health centers were collapsed.

But it was at the time of the opening and reincorporation of students into the educational centers when the work of the school nurse acquired its greatest social prominence by becoming the center of reference in the advice and execution of the measures to be adopted for the prevention of transmission, the control of the situation and the management of health incidences.

If before the pandemic, school nurses carried out their health care work through education and health care for the needs of the school population, trained educators and school workers in health measures and actions through their teaching work, compiled and analyzed health information in their research work to obtain conclusions for the benefit of school health and planned the programming of activities, as well as the coordination and management of actions within their management work, currently in addition to these functions they must assume the work of COVID coordinators of the schools.

This mostly involves: assessing each child as a possible case to determine whether it could be a possible contagion for the rest of the students and school workers, monitoring the correct compliance and interpretation of the safety rules established to avoid contagion and minimize risks, evaluating and adapting official protocols and ensuring that all established measures are complied with.

This situation serves to highlight how, since the implementation of the school nurse in educational centers up to the present day, new competencies and responsibilities have been gradually and progressively incorporated to the initial work on which it was focused, responding to the needs detected and felt by both the school community (teachers and workers of the center, families and students), as well as society in general.

Within these new competencies and responsibilities of the school nurse, it is worth highlighting those established within the framework of health promotion and encouragement through health education, and its preventive work by acting on the determinants of the health of the schoolchildren.

This evolution in their professional role means that their competency profile is becoming more and more delimited, substantiating the relevance of their work and arguing more and more clearly and evidently the need for its implementation in a general way in all educational centers, as another professional of the school interdisciplinary team.

There are solid arguments that justify the need for the implementation of the school nurse in all educational centers in general as another member of the school interdisciplinary team.

At present, their presence in the centers not only makes it possible to guarantee the care of students with specific needs that allow them to develop their training in an integrated manner, to deal with health incidents that may arise in the school environment or to care for students with chronic health problems, but they are also referents for "public health" actions in the center, as well as for the acquisition of healthy habits and behaviors in the life of the schoolchildren.

It is necessary to develop contrasted manuals that support the school nurse's own framework of action.

Once its competency framework has been defined, it is clear that school nursing constitutes an area of advanced nursing practice, with the category of specialty, and school nurses need to frame and develop their specific knowledge through manuals that allow their academic and professional advancement.

Miriam Hernández Mellado