Back to school checklist for school nurses
School nurses play a crucial role in maintaining the well-being of students. They actively collaborate with school staff, parents, doctors, and the school administration to ensure student health priorities are taken care of.
However, when a new school year starts, the first day can be overwhelming. School nurses here have to navigate through their responsibilities independently. They are tasked with identifying and intervening in potential health problems, providing case management services, immunization review, and working in partnership with other school staff to empower students through mental health support, parent and community engagement, and health education initiatives.
But how can school nurses be prepared for the initial back to school activity rush?
Simple – with a checklist!
Give yourself time to get set up
The first day or the first couple of days of work will be tough, there could be a lot of admin tasks to do such as preparing the medical supplies, special needs accommodations, time management, and prioritization. Give yourself a couple of days to set up everything. Create a checklist for adding new students, the status of equipment, existing healthcare programs, and so on.
Some of the items are:
Building relationships
Developing strong relationships with school staff, students, and families is key to effective school nursing. By establishing trust and open lines of communication, the nurse can better understand the students’ needs and provide appropriate support when needed. Building relationships also helps to better understand the needs of children and parents.
School nurses can communicate with parents through the EduHealth app to effectively communicate medication and treatment requests.
Familiarizing with policies and procedures
Understanding the school’s policies and procedures related to health services is vital for a school nurse. This includes being knowledgeable about emergency response protocols, medication administration guidelines, immunization requirements, allergy management, and health record documentation. By familiarizing themselves with these policies, the nurse can confidently ensure compliance.
EduHealth is HIPAA and FERPA compliant ensuring confidentiality, privacy, and security out of the box.
Successful EHR implementation
An EHR is an effective tool in enabling school nurses. Therefore, having your school invest in one could be a great to-do item on your checklist.
A successful EHR implementation depends on involving multiple stakeholders and matching the key metrics. Successful EHR implementation involves planning, costing, choosing vendors, third-party Integrations, user training, and more. To know more successful implementation of EduHealth, read more at A Comprehensive Guide to Successful EHR Implementation in Schools.
Information management
Information management in most cases is easier said than done. Setting up a system for information management can be one of the best ways to keep you prepared for the back-to-school rush.
You should be able to set up a documentation system for specific tasks such as review, medical incidents, procedures, and trends. Review data from the previous year to set up follow-ups and new screenings. Create an information database to identify students with specific health concerns and check for special needs, allergies, asthma, and epilepsy emergency care plans.
In this context, systems like EduHealth make it easy to track and manage medication and treatment information. Student health information is available in a few clicks. Historical health information saved on the profile can also be viewed. The charting feature helps keep track of nurse’s office visit information. You can also leverage the dynamic form functionality that allows you to create customized forms and request information from the students’ parents, which would then be linked to the student’s profile. You can also set up medication reorder notifications, so you never run out of essential medications your students need.
Reporting
A system that simplifies reporting is a must-have if you don’t want to carry the burden of manual admin work. When your local and state health authorities mandate health reports in specific formats, a system that helps to generate those reports in the specified format could make your life and work infinitely easy.
EduHealth’s reporting module can generate comprehensive health reports in a few clicks. Whether it’s to submit to local or state, the reporting mechanism makes it easy to generate the reports you need without having you break a sweat.
Health events tracking
After identifying students at risk with specific health concerns, it is important to track them for immunization and regular health checkups. So, those reminders need to be set up in the checklist.
With EduHealth that is simple. Alerts and notifications help nurses to ensure that no child is at risk. Maintaining and tracking students’ health medications and treatments is much needed for ensuring proper and prompt health care for students.
Final notes
Back to school can be a tough time, but with the right tools in hand the transition can be simple. EduHealth is one such tool that allows school nurses to be informed, monitor and report student health information right off the bat, if implemented. It keeps school nurses informed, connected, prioritizes medication safety and generates timely alerts for medications, treatments, and immunizations, enabling school nurses to provide safer and enhanced care and check off all items on their back-to-school checklist with ease.
If you like to know more about our student EHR system and how you can benefit from it, our team of experts will be happy to connect with you.
