Freddi Adelson, Former District Health Services Coordinator and School Nurse, describes her experience moving from a hospital practice to a school nurse practice.

There are two things that I remember clearly from my early (and not so early) years as a school nurse.

First, I had to find a great deal of information about every school health topic imaginable in so many different places. There were so many questions specific to school nurse practice that I had to answer because it was so very different from the Pediatric ICU setting where I had previously worked. There was information about chronic illness and how it impacted learning and typical medications used in the school setting. These medications were very different from the typical meds used in the Pediatric ICU setting.

Some other questions about school nurse practice that I had to answer by searching through several sources included:  

What was special education exactly and how was that different from 504?

What was the difference between a health plan and an emergency plan?

What did the nurse practice act say about school nursing (not much specifically)?

How was I going to find people to give students their inhalers or epi-pens on field trips? …and I could go on.

I was challenged because I couldn’t store all the information in my head (and some of it changed over time).

Second, I recall how team members looked to me as the “expert” on all things “medical.”  This happened often at student intervention team meetings when the team was reviewing a particular student. The questions often had to do with medications or diagnoses or expected outcomes of treatment. Although I was an experienced nurse, as the only healthcare practitioner in the school, I could have used some additional support and resources.

eSchoolCare is the place I wish I could have gone to back then. The information is all there in one spot at the touch of a finger. There are links to the original sources. There is expert content from practicing nurses who know school nursing. There is practical advice. I can picture myself back then in a team meeting whipping out my tablet (electronic, that is) and clicking quickly to the right section of eSchoolCare to respond to colleagues’ questions or comments. Now, eSchoolCare would be my “go to” reference.