The case for school nursing: review of the literature

A Qualitative Analysis of School Nurses' Experience Caring for Students With Psychogenic Nonepileptic Events

Psychogenic nonepileptic events (PNEE) are paroxysmal changes in behavior resembling epileptic seizures but with no electrographic correlate and are instead caused by psychological factors. In this qualitative study, semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 school nurses to identify how they perceive the experience of caring for a student with PNEE as well as supportive factors and barriers to optimal management of PNEE in schools. Several themes were identified: lack of diagnosis awareness by school staff leading to impressions that the student was "faking" the events, inadequate information provided by a health-care provider regarding the diagnosis in general and specifically about the individual student leading to a reliance on information from the student's family, feelings of doubt and insecurity about the diagnosis and management of the events, and reliance on the school nurse to develop a response plan and to manage the events which can be very time-consuming.

Rural-urban disparities in school nursing: implications for continuing education and rural school health

PURPOSE

Little is known about the professional and educational challenges experienced by rural school nurses. We conducted this study to describe disparities between the urban and rural professional school nurse workforce in New Mexico and to identify how best to meet the continuing education needs of New Mexico's rural school nurse workforce.

METHODS

We analyzed state data from a 2009 New Mexico Department of Health school nurse workforce survey (71.7% response rate). We included all survey respondents who indicated working as a school nurse in a public school setting in any grade K-12 and who identified their county of employment (N = 311).

FINDINGS

Rural school nurses were twice as likely as metropolitan nurses to provide clinical services to multiple school campuses (67.3% compared to 30.1%, P < .0001). They were less likely to hold a nursing degree at the baccalaureate level or higher (62.7% compared to 82.3%, P = .0002). Rural school nurses were less likely than metropolitan nurses to have received recent continuing education on anaphylaxis (P < .0001), asthma (P = .027), body mass index (BMI)/healthy weight (P = .0002), diabetes (P < .0001), lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) health (P = .0004), and suicide risk identification and prevention (P = .015). Online courses and telehealth were identified by rural school nurses as among the preferred means for receiving continuing education.

CONCLUSIONS

Our findings support the provision of online courses and telehealth content to address urban-rural disparities in school nursing education and support rural school health.